Page:Swedenborg, Harbinger of the New Age of the Christian Church.djvu/35



the middle of the seventeenth century was living an honest, God-fearing, and prosperous miner named Daniel Isaksson, with his wife Anna, daughter of a Swedish pastor, on his homestead called Sweden, a hundred and twenty miles northwest from Stockholm. Grateful for the large family Heaven sent them, Daniel would often say at dinner, "Thank you, my children, for this meal, for I have dined with you and not you with me: God has given me food for your sakes." His second son Jesper, born in 1653, took the name Swedberg from the homestead. Later, when for his services to church and state his family was ennobled, Jesper's children received the name Swedenborg, though the father himself retained the name Swedberg. Inheriting his father's piety, on being rescued in boyhood from imminent death—caught under a mill-wheel—he resolved never to forget either morning or evening to commit