"I am indeed satisfied, that a most convincing work might be written on the internal evidence which the writings of Swedenborg bear to their own truth; and this, not only in the great and leading doctrines which they deliver, and which they so scripturally and rationally establish, but in innumerable more minute points, in which they speak to the heart and experience, and best intelligence of man.—There is no subject of which they treat that they do not lay open in a deeper ground than is done by any other author; in particular, they discover so profoundly and distinctly the inward operations, the interior workings of the human heart and mind, and unveil man so fully to himself, that no person of reflection can attentively peruse them, without feeling a monitor in his own breast continually responding to their truth. Will it not follow, that a writer who can thus penetrate into the most secret things, and place them in a light which is at once seen to be the true one, must have been the subject of a superior illumination, and must, as he avows, have been admitted to a conscious perception of the things of that world, in which the essences of things lie open."—Page 193.
Having thus directed our attention for a few moments to the nature of those evidences,by which it is shown that Swedenborg was a divinely appointed medium,for bringing down from heaven to earth the spiritual truths of a new and more perfect dispensation, it will, in the next place, be appropriate and interesting to ask what direct revelations he has made in reference to the nature and circumstances of that Last Judgment about which we have been inquiring.
His testimony on this subject, which is also very fully sustained and corroborated by a variety of arguments drawn from the Word of the Lord, as well as from the laws of man's spiritual nature, may be found in this work entitled "The Last Judgment:" and also in "The Apocalypse Explained." I here transcribe a few passages, which though insufficient to convey any adequate idea of what the author has written on this subject, may nevertheless be of some use in inducing the reader to become acquainted with the works from which the extracts are taken.
In the Apocalypse Explained, No. 1275, our author remarks that:
