until the changes in the world of spirits are recognized as the great motor powers in human life.
The Christian world lives under the delusion that the Church founded by the apostles is to be perpetual. Its gradual corruption, its end and its judgment were all predicted by Christ himself; and its interior or spiritual history, its perversion of truth, its schisms, its great Catholic and Protestant heresies, its destruction and its judgment, are all described with the utmost minuteness in the spiritual sense of the Apocalypse. This astounding event occurred in the world of spirits, the sheol of the Old Testament, the hades of the New, in the year 1757; and one human being, whose spiritual sight and hearing were at the time opened into the spiritual world, was a witness of all the accompanying phenomena.
That witness was Emanuel Swedenborg.
The judgment executed by the Lord in the world of spirits at his first advent, delivered the human mind from the accumulated shadows of many centuries, and let in the light of heaven in such a manner that the old religions, the old philosophies, the old arts and sciences, the old governments, the old principles of life and thought were greatly modified or ceased to exist; and the Divine Word,
