Page:Emanuel Swedenborg, Scientist and Mystic.djvu/66

52 with them of certain diseases of the body and disorders of the mind, to say nothing of unknown evils not to be named. It is different with those whose love of the sex is so scanty that they are able to resist the urgings of its lust."

But there were degrees of fornication, and as he examines them in dry textbook fashion it is hard not to feel that here is the old man looking with kind detachment at the struggles of his former self, struggles that were to continue into his ripe manhood. The ideal he was clear about. It was "when man recedes from wandering lust and devotes himself to one to whose soul he unites his own soul." When that love found its physical expression in the union of bodies, he called it "conjugial love," and if there were a union of bodies without spiritual union, even if it were "licit" as in marriage, he called it "adultery," in his vivid symbolism, raising the former to be the very pillar of heaven and making the latter the essence of hell.

Some time, somewhere, Emanuel had had experience of union with a kindred spirit, perhaps it was with the girl who sang for him in England. At any rate there is in the two little poems a hint of his creed that soul and body need each other for perfection in love. As the old man wrote of these things, he said in effect that wandering lust expressing itself in fornication might turn to either good or evil.

"Natural love which is toward the sex precedes spiritual love, which is towards one of the sex," and "in fornication conjugial love may lie concealed within, as the spiritual may within the natural; yea the spiritual is in fact actually evolved out of the natural, and when the spiritual has been evolved, then the natural compasses it about as bark does the wood and as the sheath the sword, and also serves the spiritual as protection against violence."

The youth, then, whose true ideal was a union of minds as well as bodies, might, so Swedenborg thought, pass unscathed through a period of fornication, "for the intention is the soul of all action," and a man was not to be blamed overmuch while he was in the process of evolving from natural youthful concupiscence into "conjugial" or spiritual love. Too much wandering or varietism, as he called it, might, however, destroy the man's capacity for feeling the