Page:Swedenborg, Harbinger of the New Age of the Christian Church.djvu/244

 had engaged two comfortable rooms. One of my first questions was whether he had no male attendant to wait upon him in his old age, and to accompany him on his journeys. He answered that he needed no one to look after him, because his angel was ever with him, and conversed and held communication with him. If another man had uttered these words, he would have made me laugh; but I never thought of laughing when this venerable man, eighty-one years old, told me this—he looked far too innocent; and when he gazed on me with his smiling blue eyes, which he always did in conversing with me, it was as if truth itself was speaking from them. I often noticed with surprise how scoffers, who had made their way into large companies where I had taken him, and whose purpose it had been to make fun of the old gentleman, forgot all their laughter and their intended scoffing; and how they stood agape and listened to the most singular things which he, like an openhearted child, told about the spiritual world, without reserve and with full confidence. It almost seemed as if his eyes possessed the faculty of imposing silence on every one.

"He lived with simple burgher folks, who kept