his Word, in his providence, in our own souls; and imvardly through spirits and angels. The wonder is, not that God speaks to us, but that we, poor ignorant creatures, refuse to believe it and will not hear him.
We have no statement from Swedenborg himself either printed or written of the first manifestation of the Lord Jesus Christ to his mental vision. There is a story handed down by tradition, and which contains nothing improbable, that while eating heartily at dinner, his spiritual eyes were opened for a moment or so, during which he saw his floor covered with serpents and toads, representative of the gross evils of gluttony, and a man in the corner of the room who said to him, "Eat not so much."
The next night, the same man appeared to him, this time, as Dr. Beyer professes to have received from the mouth of Swedenborg, "sitting in purple and majestic splendor near his bed." This man or angel or spirit, or the Lord himself shorn of his glory and veiled in accommodation to the state of the new seer, gave him a commission to open the spiritual sense of the Word of God.
"I have been called," says Swedenborg, in a letter to Dr. Hartley, dated 1769, " to a holy office by the Lord himself, who has most graciously mani-
