appeared to me. I was seized with horror. I sweated and trembled. My heart beat in a frightful manner. The devil conversed with me. His logic was accompanied by a voice so alarming that the blood froze in my veins."
Zuinglius had a similar experience when he was half asleep. A phantom, black or white, he could not say which, appeared before him, called him a coward, and stirred him up to fight. This is explained by Forbes Winslow as a case of overheated sensorium, "during the transient continuance of which the retina became so disturbed as to conjure up a phantom which the patient not only mistook for a reality, but, what is still worse, acted upon his mistaken or diseased imagination."
Swedenborg's visions were of the same class. He was educated, devoted himself for many years to science, and up to his fifty-fourth year had the reputation of a scientific and philosophic student; was a professor in the mineralogical school, and believed to be a simple-minded man of the world. About 1743 he had a violent fever, in which for a little time he was mad, and rushed from the house stark naked, proclaiming himself the Messiah. After that period a change took place in him, and he lived twenty-nine years in the firm conviction that he held continual intercourse with angels and also with deceased human beings. He says that he conversed with St. Paul during the whole year, particularly in reference to the text Romans iii. 28. He asserted that he had conversed three times with St. John, once with Moses, a hundred times with Luther, and with angels daily "for twenty years."
Swedenborg had an elevated style of thought, and when reasoning upon the fundamental principle which underlies his theological views, he is acute and pro-
