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66 tudes of people are said to read his books and bring away almost no intellectual result, multitudes who resort to them with great apparent complacency, and get, no doubt, much incidental entertainment and instruction from them, and yet are quite blind to their proper intellectual significance, to the extent, I am told, many of them, of seeming acutely hostile to it when it is brought before them. All this, of course, because of the more or less vacant mind they bring to the reading of him; or rather, their more or less unsympathetic hearts. Most of them come to the banquet of facts and observations Swedenborg spreads before them with an obvious gross hankering after ecclesiastical righteousness, and make the most, accordingly, of every crumb they can pick up adapted to gratify that unmanly and dyspeptic relish. But if you bring human sympathies to the banquet in question, I can assure you, you will find no speck of that base, unworthy nutriment. For it cannot be too much insisted on, that no books address the reader's intellect so much through the heart as these of Swedenborg do, all in confining themselves to giving him spiritual information merely.

This is no doubt an endless stumbling-block to the mass of readers, who regard Swedenborg as a sort of intellectual tailor, whose shop they have only to enter, to find whatsoever spiritual garments their particular