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The transcendent intellectual and moral superiorities of this "Euclid of holiness," as Emerson calls him, with his "soliform eye and his boniform soul," the two quaint adjectives being from the mint of Cudworth, are fully dilated upon in the addition to the original article called "Plato: New Readings." Few readers will be satisfied with the Essay entitled "Swedenborg; or, the Mystic."
Had Henderson made a bid for his heart, he would surely have responded; but Henderson had a heart only for the fantastic mental gyrations of Swedenborg, and merely made his living out of Michael. Sometimes there were hardships. Michael accepted them.
My father, who could never get himself converted at any of the camp-meetings where my grandfather often led the forces of prayer to his support, and had at last to be given up in despair, fell in with the writings of Emanuel Swedenborg, and embraced the doctrine of that philosopher with a content that has lasted him all the days of his many years.
As I continued my investigation into the causes of disease, and especially as I read the writings of Emanuel Swedenborg, I began to see more and more clearly that diseases, to a large extent at least, have a spiritual origin, and that the great obstacles to the removal of their causes lie in the false doctrines of Christian churches.
The transportation of Swedenborg by the Angel who served as guide to this first journey is told with a sublimity which exceeds, by the distance which God has placed betwixt the earth and the sun, the great epics of Klopstock, Milton, Tasso, and Dante.
Some went to West Roxbury to church in the morning, some, maybe, to the Eyry to read Swedenborg or other writers, and unless Mr. Channing or some other minister who desired to preach was present, there were no set services; and even if there were, a walk might be arranged for a later hour in the summer afternoons.
The proprietor, with a sombre nature and a black beard so like the established shadows of his lumbered premises that he could have been overlooked for part of the unsalable stock, read Swedenborg, Plato, Plutarch, and Young's Night Thoughts the latter an edition of the eighteenth century in which an Edinburgh parson had made frail marginal comments, yellow and barely discernible, such as: "How True!"
But Henry James was incommensurably more Swedenborgian than either of us: he lived and thought and felt Swedenborg with an entirety and intensity far beyond the mere assent of other men. He did not do this in any stupidly exclusive way, but in the most luminously inclusive way, with a constant reference of these vain mundane shadows to the spiritual realities from which they project.
Not long after this a lady whom I was attending asked me if I would not like to read Professor George Bush's reasons for accepting as true the revelations contained in the writings of Emanuel Swedenborg.
With due allowance for exaggeration, such a name would describe tolerably the Transcendental mystics, a Toler, a Boehmen, or a Swedenborg; but with what justice can it be applied to the cautious, methodical Spinoza, who carried his thoughts about with him for twenty years, deliberately shaping them, and who gave them at last to the world in a form more severe than with such subjects had ever been so much as attempted before?
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