Page:Emanuel Swedenborg, Scientist and Mystic.djvu/40

28 The Bishop tells how he had been left a silver mug by a courtier whom he attended on his deathbed, but he didn't receive it. "The will was contested, for the silver mug was fine and important. The court preacher who buried him got the silver mug, but also rather a hard death in Bender, Turkey. A lynx ate him up. The silver mug couldn't help him."

Archbishop Swebelius had not, Swedberg thought, stood up for his hymnbook as he should. When the Cathedral of Upsala burned, the Archbishop's corpse, which lay in a copper cofiin and was immured in a grave with a stone on top, was all incinerated. "But my hymnbooks which weren't even bound didn't get as much as scorched . . . thus does God preserve in the fire that which evil people do not like."

When Professor Jerfeld, "a bold and arrogant man," told King Charles XI right to his face that Swedberg's hymnbook might lead to much trouble, even to a war of religion, the angry King "pushed him against the wall, because of which he had to take to his bed, where he could think about his bold arrogance. He died in a few days." Swedberg's marginal comment on this is: "Prof. Jerfeld gets into hot water."

Less bloodthirsty miracles were also wrought for him, such as the stopping of rain or the coming of it, as needed. He says furthermore that he was able to heal people by the laying on of hands, to drive out demons, and he claims he even raised a girl from the dead. He expects that the envious and the worldly will jeer at him for this, and for recording it, but he will comfort himself by remembering that the Pharisees jeered at Christ himself, and that Christ had his evangelists put his miracles into writing.

Instead of being crucified, however, Jesper Swedberg was to be made a bishop. In 1703 he left Upsala to live at the episcopal residence of Brunsbo, near Skara.

One of his children he did not take with him; this was Emanuel. Since the age of eleven Emanuel had been entered in the university, and he was now to live with his brother-in-law, the college librarian, Eric Benzelius.

He was in his fourteenth year; his childhood was over. It is doubtful if he continued to see his father as the Bishop imagined