Page:Emanuel Swedenborg, Scientist and Mystic.djvu/63

V ] his disquietude about the Presbyterians in words which the astonished Hesselius noted in his diary: 8 "So many vipers borne in England's bosom which would sting her to death." After which, the Swede added, the mob broke up the meetings of the Presbyterians and burned their pulpits and books.

But England's bosom is broad and tough. Anglicans and Presbyterians managed to survive in it, together with a lot of other sects. The freedom of speech natural to England, and the freedom of thought due to the new outlook of science, released people into doctrinal diversities as well as into the atheism that was concealed under deistic lip-service to an absentee God, who, having started the machine of the universe running, no longer concerned himself about it.

This state of affairs, which much resembled that of the nineteenth century, had brought into being a group of men later to be known as the Cambridge Platonists. They could not hold with the dry formalism of official religion, nor with the crude combative theology of the ignorant sects, nor with the universe-machine of some intellectuals such as Hobbes. The same conditions that led to the formation of the Society for Psychical Research in the England of the 1880's led to the drawing together of these men, classical scholars, who wanted to reconcile reason with religion, without offending either, and on the highest plane.

They found the reconciliation in the works of Plato as interpreted by Plotinus. Very briefly, the core of their faith was that reason craved a unified universe, all mind or all matter, all God or no God. Current religion offered a universe split into two. The mysticism of Plato-Plotinus, like the mysticism of the Hindu Upanishads, taught that the world was all God, having emanated or radiated from that unknowable, uncreated source, matter being simply the radiation farthest from the center. The Christian platonists were able to explain the Trinity as different emanations from the same God and thus remain orthodox in theory.

Is it likely that they influenced young Emanuel Swedberg?

He had paid dutiful calls on his father's ecclesiastical friends, he had paid his dues as a member of the Swedish Lutheran congregation in London, and no doubt he went to church on Sunday. He had answered the questions his brother-in-law put to him about