Page:Emanuel Swedenborg, Scientist and Mystic.djvu/379

XXIX ] as he could not expect to derive any additional advantage from this world, which he would soon leave. He thereupon half rose in his bed, and laying his sound hand upon his breast said with some manifestation of zeal: 'As true as you see me before your eyes, so true is everything that I have written; and I could have said more, had it been permitted. When you enter eternity, you will see everything, and then you and I shall have much to talk about.'" 3

Pastor Ferelius then gave him the last sacrament, which Swedenborg took, in his own words, "with thankfulness." He could: the traditional vessels of the old religion he had filled with a wine of his own.

He did not die till about three weeks later, but some days before his death he told the date of it to Elizabeth Reynolds, the maid at the Shearsmiths', and, she reported, "He was pleased, as if he was going to have a holiday, to go on some merry-making." 4

This did not mean that Swedenborg thought life had been a sojourn in a vale of tears. Once he wrote in his Spiritual Diary: "Some think that they who are in the faith should remove from themselves all the delights of life, and all the pleasures of the body; but this I can assert, that delights and pleasures have never been denied to me; for I have been permitted to enjoy not only the pleasures of the body and the senses, like those who live in the world, but I have also been permitted to enjoy such delights and felicities of life as I believe no persons in the whole world ever before enjoyed, which were greater and more exquisite than any person could imagine and believe." 5

He had felt and continued to feel the peace in comparison with which, as he had said, gladness and tranquillity were as nothing. It shone from his face, and he wanted to share it with others. Let us rise, he had said, above our senses and into a loftier sphere of understanding; if we do this "the more we become neighbors to a higher, spiritual, divine power; the more we become men, the vicarious divinities of the earth." 6

Swedenborg had noticed that when he gave dolls to children he could see that they thought of them and treated them as if they were alive.