Page:Emanuel Swedenborg, Scientist and Mystic.djvu/51

IV ] on Natural Law. It shows a handsome, half-smiling youth with definite regular features but still boyishly plump. In spite of his father's hell-fire clamor against wigs, he wears a powdered wig, the long, curling and flowing kind, a very becoming frame. One suspects lace cuffs on the long fitted coat, and a gleam of a rapier. Emanuel was rather tall, he could carry this male plumage well. The students insisted on it as their right.

It was a male period in Sweden's history.14 By 1706 the incredible King Charles XII, then twenty-four years of age, had already been at war for several years and had won battles with the Danes, the Russians, the Saxons, and imposed a new king on the Poles. He had so impressed the world that Marlborough himself came to see Charles near Leipzig to find out if western Europe needed to fear him. Whether the Englishman understood the Swedish Puritan who at least believed that he fought only for his just rights is doubtful, but he was able to reassure England that Charles would need no bribes to attack Russia again—not that it would have been a safe occupation to offer bribes to Charles XII!

The Sweden of that day was twice its present size. The Baltic was its lake. But the population of the whole empire was only about three million, of which half inhabited Sweden proper. The bulk of the people were peasants, freeholders, and the educated classes fell into fairly rigid castes, Sweden being then as it still is the most formal of the Scandinavian nations. At that time industry was immature and commerce not for gentlemen. You belonged to the church or the army or the civil service. Under Charles XI the royal power had been made almost absolute so that those who wanted preferment had to look to the throne. Bishop Swedberg was expert in this but not so his son. What was Emanuel to be? Since the church was out of the question there was always that appendage of the church, the university. Perhaps he could be a teacher or an official of some sort. But first he had to finish his own education.

Education has to finish with a flourish, a rainbow loop of displayed knowledge, to be satisfactory to all parties, teacher and student, family and friends. An essay read aloud was the accepted form.

On the first of June, 1709, Emanuel Swedberg, aged twenty-one, read a very long paper in the large Gustavian auditorium, so there