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And the wisdom of the Roman Church sees herein a type of the temporal and spiritual power of the Papacy! I am solemnly warned against such learned puerilities every time I turn to my shelves and encounter Swedenborg's "Arcana Coelestia."
"I myself," he says, "when a young man used to go sometimes to the sacrilegious entertainments and spectacles; I saw the priests raving in religious excitement, and heard the choristers; I took pleasure in the shameful games which were celebrated in honour of gods and goddesses, of the Virgin Coelestia, and of Berecynthia, the mother of all gods.
As Kant vainly wrote to Swedenborg and others as he vainly spent 7£. on 'Arcana Coelestia, so Sir Walter was anxious to go to Egypt to examine the facts of ink-gazing clairvoyance. Kant confesses that each individual ghost-story found him sceptical, whereas the cumulative mass made a considerable impression. Kant's irony is peculiarly Scottish.
They may, like their great apostle, have seasons of inner rapture, and like him revel in the mysteries of the Arcana Coelestia, but if so they keep the thing very subdued. They never scream nor shout about anything, and would refuse to do so if you asked them.
Kant pined to see Swedenborg himself, and waited eagerly for his book, 'Arcana Coelestia. At last he obtained this work, at the ransom, ruinous to Kant at that time, of 7£. But he was disappointed with what he read, and in 'Träume eines Geistersehers, made a somewhat sarcastic attempt at a metaphysical theory of apparitions. 'Velut aegri somnia vanae Finguntur species' is his motto.
Inasmuch as the correspondence of the heart and lungs With the will and understanding is treated of in what now follows, and upon this correspondence is based that of all parts of the body, namely, the members, the organs of the senses, and the viscera throughout the body, and inasmuch as the correspondence of natural things with spiritual has been heretofore unknown, and yet is amply shown in two works, one of which treats of Heaven and Hell and the other, the Arcana Coelestia, of the spiritual sense of the Word in Genesis and Exodus, I will here point out what has been written and shown in those two works respecting correspondence.
In his heart he denied the charge even more warmly; for, as he spoke, he saw the great cork-slabs on which hundreds of moths and butterflies made dazzling spots of colour; saw the sheets of pink blotting-paper between which his collection of native plants lay pressed; the glass case filled with geological specimens; his Bible, the margins of which round Genesis were black with his handwriting; a pile of books on the new marvel Spiritualism; Colenso's PENTATEUCH; the big black volumes of the ARCANA COELESTIA; Locke on Miracles: he saw all these things and more.
As the servant removed the tray, he looked up at his pupil, and said "Please wheel the lounge nearer to the grate; I am too tired to sit up to-night." She complied at once, shook up the pillow, and, as he laid his head upon it, she spread his heavy plaid shawl over him. "Now, sir, what shall I read this evening?" "'Arcana Coelestia, if you please."
She sat at his feet, and listened by the hour to the outpourings of his fervid zeal. If she did not understand them, she was in no worse position than himself. His tongue was fluent. His words were like a lambent flame, playing with some indestructible material. His mind was weak, and devoted to metaphysical speculations mysticisms: the arcana coelestia of Swedenborg was Holy Writ to him.
This book dealt with man, not as a product of brute creation, but as an evolutionary creature, having at least a possibility of divine origin. It is, however, his "Arcana Coelestia" upon which "The Church of the New Jerusalem" is founded; and it is this work which caused Swedenborg's friends and colleagues to determine that he had become insane.
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