Page:Emanuel Swedenborg, Scientist and Mystic.djvu/90

74 But, as Sir James Jeans has said, "A mechanical model or picture must represent things as happening in space and time, while it has recently become clear that the ultimate processes of nature neither occur in, nor admit of representation in, space and time." 8

That would have pleased Swedenborg. It would have seemed to him that we were back at the mathematical or, as he often called it, "the natural" point.

To his father, Bishop Swedberg, it must have seemed a very fine point indeed, if he noticed it. About 1722, when Emanuel had gone abroad in search of improved mining methods, his father wrote to a kinsman about him: "Would to God that he succeed with his many experiments and discoveries and that experience may prove their value." 9 The tone implied that his son ought to be making good in some tangible way, and when he saw the three big volumes of the Opera Philosophica et Mineralia that Emanuel had brought back from abroad in 1734, the father may have been impressed, at least by their having been ducally sponsored.

But probably Bishop Swedberg did no more than glance at the tomes before he returned to his favorite occupation, the revision of his autobiography to show how his various predictions had come true—how the grievous sin of sabbath-breaking had indeed brought pestilence and war on the country, and how God had preferred and upheld him, Jesper Swedberg, in every way. He was perfectly serene about the reception that awaited him in the world to come. In heaven, according to him, the "saved" sat at table with Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob, waited on by holy angels; or, if especially distinguished, such as he, they sat on thrones wearing crowns. He noted that on one of those occasions when his colleagues in the Diet had so maliciously misunderstood his motives, he had informed them as follows: "At least I know that God will order my angel to have a crown ready which is to be set on my head in God's triumphant Kingdom. While I go to my seat of honor, which after this I shall continue, with the aid of God, to adorn with still greater courage, renown and honor." 10

His second wife, Sara Bergia, Emanuel's kind stepmother, had died in 1720 when the Bishop was sixty-eight. He praised her death for being as "quiet, as she herself was quiet and gentle and pious."