The Life and Mission of Emanuel Swedenborg/Appendix
The famous Bull Unigenitus was issued at the instigation of the Jesuits. As a means for its enforcement, the Jesuit clergy in France resolved that notes should be obtained of dying persons, that these notes should be signed by priests who maintained the authority of the Bull, and that without such notes no person should receive the last sacraments of the Church. Among other things this Bull denounced as false, blasphemous, heretical, and reprobate the following propositions, which had been published by Father Quesnel, a Jansenist, with his New Testament:—
"That it is useful and necessary for all persons to know the Scriptures.
"That the reading of the Scriptures is for everybody.
"That the sacred obscurity of the Word of God is no reason for the laity to excuse themselves from reading it.
"That the Lord's day ought to be sanctified by Christians, in reading pious books and, above all, the Scriptures.
"That it is a great mistake to imagine that the knowledge of the mysteries of religion ought not to be imparted to women, by the reading of the Sacred Books.
"That to wrest the New Testament out of the hands of Christians, is to keep it closed up, by taking from them the means of understanding it,—is no other than to close up the mouth of Christ as to them.
"That to forbid to Christians the reading of the Holy Scriptures, especially of the Gospel, is no other than to forbid the use of light to the children of light.
"That to deprive the unlearned people of the comfort of joining their voices with the voice of the whole Church, is a custom contrary to apostolical practice and to the design of God."
Mademoiselle Bourignon, born and bred a Roman Catholic in the 17th century, was keenly alive to the state of the Church. In The Light of the World, published in England in 1696, and giving a report of her conversations, it is said:—
"I asked her if she firmly believed that the last times were come; and whether the judgment approached.
"She said to me: Believe me, Sir, there is nothing more true; we actually live in the last times; and the judgment is so near, that before three years I believe you will see the effects of it. . . . We may see by the lives of men now, that all the signs are fallen out which Jesus Christ has foretold, namely, that iniquity shall be multiplied, and charity in many shall wax cold, and so of the rest. . . . The life of men is the open book in which these truths are written, and the Holy Scriptures are the equitable Judge which pronounces the sentence. Read, Sir, with attention, they will deliver you from the difficulty you find in believing this; for though indeed they do not determine precisely the day of judgment, yet they will make you see sufficiently that the chief signs which must precede it do already appear. . . . Truth, which is the true Sun of Righteousness, cannot any longer appear openly; it is become black and hateful to all the world, who, desiring to be flattered and praised, cannot hear the truth, because it reproves the falsehood which now prevails. . . . I entreat you to read attentively the 24th chapter of St. Matthew; it speaks of the present time. All the Parables do the same. I wish I had time and leisure to explain them to you; you would see as well as I that the judgment approaches, for all the fore-running signs are already come. People do not perceive them, for want of reflecting seriously enough on the Holy Scriptures, or upon the inward life of men now-a-days: they amuse themselves with regarding only their outward piety, imagining that there are yet a great many good men, because they appear such; but before God all are corrupted. . . . Many souls will be deceived at death, who in their lifetime presumed they were true Christians, while in the sight of God they will be worse than heathens. Such is the blindness wherein we live at present, in which nobody makes a right judgment of himself, or of others, every one presuming to be saved without good works; whereas no works can be good if they do not proceed from charity, which is at present banished from the hearts of all men; for which cause there are no more perfect Christians upon earth, for the Christian life is all charity, and the love of God, which is no longer in use. . . . There has been no longer charity upon earth, Sir, since Christians left the Gospel simplicity; from that time charity began to wax cold; and when the Church would needs establish herself in pomp, riches, and magnificence, this outward splendor has utterly destroyed the spirit of the Gospel. Studies have banished the Holy Spirit, and the learning of men has stifled the wisdom of God" (p. 19).
Father Lambert, a Jansenist, wrote somewhat later,—
"In examining with a good faith the different characteristics which, in the Apocalypse, the woman who is a harlot presents, it is very difficult not to recognize under this emblem the city of Rome. . . . There is then every reason to believe that the holy Apostle, in casting his eyes forward to the future, which was still separated from him by an interval of so many ages, shows us a Christian city; but which will then be depraved, corrupted, laden with iniquities, making religion subservient to her pride, her domination, her avarice; and which will merit from God the outpouring upon her of the cup of His wrath."[1]
In illustration of the proud domination here referred to, witness the declarations by Leo the Great that he possessed, as the Head of the Church and by participation, the power of Christ, and that as such he was the head of a Church whose top reached unto heaven; by Count de Maistre, that the Sovereign Pontiff is "the necessary, the only, the exclusive basis of Christianity;" by Cornelius a Lapide, that "the Pope, as being the vicar of God, represents God;" by Dionysius, that the One seen by John sitting on the throne (Rev. iv.) is the Pope; by Alcasar, that "the Pope as the vicar of Christ is in a manner Christ Himself," and that "the priests of the Church have a power more sublime than the very seraphim themselves, and one which is especially proper to God;" by St. Bernard, that their order is "preferred before angels, archangels, thrones, and dominations;" and by the Rhemish Testament, "The Father gave all power to the Son; but I see the same power altogether delivered by the Son unto them"—the priests.
Dr. Watts had said, in his treatise on the Improvement of the Mind,—
"Nor should a student in Divinity imagine that our age is arrived at a full understanding of everything which can be known by the Scriptures. Every age since the Reformation hath thrown some further light on difficult texts and paragraphs of the Bible, which have been long obscured by the early rise of Antichrist; and since there are at present many difficulties and darknesses hanging about certain truths of the Christian religion; and since several of these relate to important doctrines, such as the origin of sin, the fall of Adam, the Person of Christ, the blessed Trinity, the decrees of God, etc., which do still embarrass the minds of honest and inquiring readers, and which make work for noisy controversy,—it is certain there are several things in the Bible yet unknown, and not sufficiently explained; and it is certain there is some way to solve these difficulties, and to reconcile these seeming contradictions. And why may not a sincere searcher of truth, in the present age, by labor, diligence, study, and prayer, with the best use of his reasoning powers, find out the proper solution of these knots and perplexities, which have hitherto been unsolved, and which have afforded matter for angry quarrelling? Happy is the man who shall be favored of Heaven to give a helping hand towards the introduction of the blessed age of light and love."
In what manner Swedenborg was thus favored, the body of this book should show. But independently of his labors, and in wholly different manner, other men have been at work, and have been favored, from the time of Bengel till now.
Philip Matthias Hahn (died 1790) said, "I regard this the true spirit of Christianity,—when every word of God in the Old and in the New Testament is sweet, important, and dear; and when we find therein no favorite truths, but everything is good and agreeable to us, because it is connected with the rest."
Johann Gottfried von Herder (died 1803) said, "It is certainly a fine thread which pervades the Old and New Testaments, especially in those passages where symbol and fact, history and poetry, mingle together. Rough hands can seldom follow it, much less unravel it, without breaking or tangling it, or without injuring either the poetry or history which, knitting themselves into it, constitute it a complete unity. It is truly said, 'To explain belongs to God,' or to that man on whom there rests the spirit of the gods, the genius of all ages, and, so to speak, the childhood of the human race."
And again, "In order to be assisted, the revelation of God, as found in the Bible, and even in the entire history of the human race, must be believed, and thus ever return to the great centre about which everything revolves and clusters—Jesus Christ, the Corner-stone and inheritance, the greatest messenger, teacher, and person of the Archetype."
Hagenbach says, "The study of the Bible in the last decades has gained not only in impartiality, but in freshness and interest. How very different are a Pauline epistle and the Gospel of John now explained at the universities from what they were a quarter of a century ago? . . . There is no more a disposition to explain meagrely the written letter, but to penetrate the inmost depths of the Biblical writer's soul and by them to understand him."
Dr. Dorner says, "The extension of vision in modern theology to the entire history and philosophy of religion, has already produced not only new problems, but brilliant and fruitful results, profitable not only to the theology of the New Testament, but also to the elucidation and confirmation of Christianity itself. . . . The entire Old Testament and its religion is beginning to be treated . . . as one great prophecy, a rich compensation for those individual prophecies which had to be given up as exegetically untenable."[2]
The Rev. Andrew Jukes says, "The types of Genesis foreshadow God's great dispensational purposes respecting man's development; showing in mystery His secret will and way respecting the different successive dispensations. The types of Exodus bring out, as their characteristic, redemption and its consequences; a chosen people are here redeemed out of bondage, and brought into a place of nearness to God. Leviticus again differs from each of these, dealing, I think I may say solely, in types connected with access to God. Numbers and Joshua are again perfectly different, the one giving us types connected with our pilgrimage as in the wilderness; the other, types of our place as over Jordan,—that is, as dead and risen with Christ." And further, speaking of the types of Leviticus,—"Though Christ in His work is the sum and substance of these types, it is Christ as discerned by one who already knows the certainty of redemption; it is Christ as seen by one who, possessing peace with God and deliverance, is able to look with joy at all that Christ has so fully been for him, . . . Exodus gives us the blood of the Lamb, saving Israel in the land of Egypt. Leviticus gives us the priest and the offerings, meeting Israel's need in their access to Jehovah."[3]
Fichte, first after Swedenborg, sought a philosophic reason for the Incarnation:—
"Mankind is by the exertion of its freedom to destroy an antagonistic condition, and to form itself into a kingdom of God, into a world in which God alone is the principle of all activity, and in which nothing is done without Him from whom all human freedom proceeds, and to whom it is surrendered. This must indeed take place in detail through each individual, and that power of freedom which determines him. But for this purpose there was needed an example of this determination to self-immolation and self-surrender. Whence was mankind to have this? It could only have it by means of a previously possessed freedom, and yet in its present state it can only obtain freedom by means of this example. Thus a circle arises: freedom presupposes the example, the example presupposes freedom. This circle is only to be abolished by the fact that the example should once be actual reality, absolutely original, beginning from the very roots, and realizing itself in a person. Now this did take place in Jesus. He is unique through His originality. All who enter the kingdom of heaven attain it only through Him, through the example which He sets up in Himself for the whole race; for all are to be born again through Him, while He is the first and the firstborn Son. Thus does Fichte endeavor to infer from an à priori law the necessity of the Person of Jesus."[4]
So also, later, says Dr. Dorner himself,—
"The form and contents of Revelation only attain their consummation in the Divine Incarnation, and in such a way that the consummation of Divine Revelation in itself becomes also the consummation of religion, and therewith of humanity. This perfective process is carried into effect first of all in One who, as absolute God-man, is both the Revealer in the absolute sense and the Man embodying God's perfect image, while at the same time bringing about the consummation of the world.
"The meaning of the text is, that neither the form nor the content of Revelation attains its perfection and the goal which Revelation cannot but propose to itself, until it has passed into Incarnation. On God's side, the purpose of His love from the beginning is perfect self-communication; the form and contents of Revelation. . . . The most perfect organ of Revelation can only be the man who, from the first moment of his existence, in his entire person lives in a sphere of being pertaining to Revelation and never separated from God. But in the circumstance of his entire person being made an organ of Revelation, is given at once in inseparable unity external as well as internal revelation and the completion of both. For now the Divine life itself enters into a human life; it assumes a shape that embodies and manifests the Divine life in human form, and is therefore Divine-human. In the God-man the inner spiritual miracle is so united with the outer world-reality, that the union of the Divine and human life, implied in the idea of inspiration without measure, forms a man who in the midst of the world is a personal miracle,—the God-man who, possessed of absolute worth in himself, fully answers to the communicating will of Divine love, and is withal destined both in himself to give perfect expression to human nature, and outside himself to consummate human nature."[5]
The views of Dr. Dorner are not precisely those of Swedenborg, whom he treats with respect, but without accepting his direct antagonism to Calvinism. Dr. D, is the greatest exponent of the effort in this new age to find a philosophic basis and interpretation of the old Christian theology; and the approach to the doctrines of Swedenborg is a sign of the times.
"The history of the English Deists of the eighteenth century is indeed a very singular one. At a time when the spirit of the theology of the Church was eminently rationalistic, they were generally repudiated, and by the middle of the eighteenth century they had already fallen into neglect. . . . A latent scepticism and a wide-spread indifference might be everywhere traced among the educated classes. There was a common opinion that Christianity was untrue, but essential to society, and that on this ground alone it should be retained. . . . The old religion seemed everywhere loosening around the minds of men, and it had often no great influence even on its defenders. . . . Butler, in the preface to his Analogy, declared that 'it had come to be taken for granted that Christianity is not so much as a subject of inquiry, but that it is now at length discovered to be fictitious. . . As different ages have been distinguished by different sorts of particular errors and vices, the deplorable distinction of ours is an avowed scorn of religion in some and a growing disregard of it in the generality.' . . . Montesquieu summed up his observations on English life by declaring, no doubt with great exaggeration, that there was no religion in England, that the subject, if mentioned in society, excited nothing but laughter, and that not more than four or five members of the House of Commons were regular attendants at church. . . . 'People of fashion,' said Archbishop Secker, 'especially of that sex which ascribes to itself most knowledge, have nearly thrown off all observation of the Lord's Day, . . . and if to avoid scandal they sometimes vouchsafe their attendance on Divine worship in the country, they seldom or never do it in town.'. . . Sunday card-parties during a great part of the eighteenth century were fashionable entertainments in the best circles."[6]
"Sir William Blackstone 'had the curiosity, early in the reign of George III., to go from church to church and hear every clergyman of note in London. He says that he did not hear a single discourse which had more Christianity in it than the writings of Cicero; and that it would have been impossible for him to discover, from what he heard, whether the preacher were a follower of Confucius, of Mahomet, or of Christ.'"[7]
It was about the year 1686, that Philip Jacob Spener founded what soon came to be called contemptuously Pietism, in an effort to unite brethren in a life of practical piety. A Lutheran, he had no wish to renounce or supplant Lutheranism, but contented himself with getting kindred spirits to read and pray together, to renounce worldly vanities, and to live a pious, charitable life. The rapidity with which the people caught at his system shows the readiness of their hearts for something more satisfying than dogmatic theology. The same spirit of the times is shown in the phenomenon of "the praying children," which appeared in connection with the Pietists in 1707. Children from four years old and upwards suddenly began assembling in the open fields, singing and praying, especially for the recovery of the churches that had been seized by the Catholics. From field to field the contagion spread, in spite of prohibition and even of blows, till it extended over the whole country, and was checked only by the providing of churches for their meetings. Then it soon died out. At Halle the Pietists were permitted to control the new university, and by the year 1727 more than six thousand theologians had received from them their theological education. Their system was violently opposed by the Orthodox, for they taught that regeneration was not effected by baptism, as Luther and Calvin held with the Mother Church, but was an awakening or conversion, which was conditioned in subsequent life by the Word of God; that only living faith attained justification, and that it must be active in preserving it, a sure guarantee existing only in a faith which gave evidence of being alive in a pious life and active Christianity. Later Pietism became more formal and declined, but it had already "poured a mighty religious stream into the national life, and sustained it by zealous preaching, pastoral care, devotional meetings, and an almost exuberant devotional literature."[8] Moreover, Pietism widely and increasingly modified the teaching of the whole Lutheran Church, as Methodism had done that of the Anglican Church, and as Moravianism, in less degree, that of the Reformed or Calvinist Church.
A spirit nearly akin to that of the Pietists became conspicuous in the Roman Catholic Church, at the incoming of the eighteenth century, in the lives and writings of Madame Guyon and Archbishop Fénelon. Nothing purer and more elevated had appeared in the Church. Nothing perhaps has exercised greater influence for good both in the Catholic and in the Protestant Churches, to this day. Yet their substitution of inward, spontaneous, fervid prayer in place of the formalities of the Church was thought to interfere with its power, and Madame Guyon and the good Archbishop both fell under its condemnation,—the one being sent to pass her days in a dungeon, the other meekly bowing in submission to the Holy See.
It is remarkable that the Moravians, under Zinzendorf, with their ecstatic profession of affectional union with their Saviour, attracted the interest first of Wesley and somewhat later of Swedenborg, at their meetings in London. Wesley was much influenced by them, about the beginning of his great revival, in 1738; but Swedenborg soon discovered their insincerity and denounced them, for which he was denounced in turn. Of the great movement set on foot by the Wesleys and Whitefield it is to be remembered that nothing equal in extent and power had occurred since the Reformation. And indeed it was, with Pietism, a reformation like that of John the Baptist in the wilderness, laying low the mountains and raising up the valleys in preparation for what was to come.
The conditions of a consummation are as obvious in the causes of the French Revolution as in the catastrophe itself. Among these causes we may reckon first the oppression of the laboring class by Church and State and Gentry, all for mere voluptuous indulgence. Fénelon wrote to the king,—
"Your people are dying of hunger. The tillage of the land is almost abandoned. Towns and villages are being depopulated. All the trades languish and no longer feed the workmen. . . . In place of drawing money from this poor people, they ought to receive alms and be fed. All France is nothing now but a great hospital, stripped and without provisions. Popular movements, which had been long unknown, are becoming frequent. . . . You are reduced to the deplorable extremity, either of leaving sedition unpunished, or of massacring the people whom you drive to despair, and who are perishing every day with disease caused by famine. While they want bread, you yourself want money, and you will not see the extremity to which you are reduced."
An official account in 1698 had said,—
"In the greater part of Rouen, in Normandy, which was always one of the most industrious and well-to-do provinces, out of seven hundred thousand souls there are not fifty thousand who eat bread at their ease and who sleep on anything better than straw. In the greater part of Caen the population has diminished a half by poverty."
In 1707 Vauban wrote,—
"The tenth part of the people is reduced to beggary, and begs in fact: two million beggars out of twenty million people. Of the other nine tenths there are five who are not in condition to give alms to the one tenth, because they are within a trifle of being reduced to the same wretched condition; and of the four remaining tenths, three are very poorly off."
In 1725 Saint Simon wrote,—
"The poor people of Normandy eat grass, and the kingdom is turned into a vast hospital of the dying and of those driven to despair."
In 1740 Bishop Massillon wrote to Minister Fleury,—
"My lord, the people of our country live in frightful poverty, without bed, without furniture. The greater part even lack, for half the year, oat and barley bread, which makes their sole subsistence, and are obliged to tear it from their own and their children's mouths to pay their taxes."
In 1745 the Duke of Orleans said to Louis XV. on presenting him with some fern bread: "Sire, see on what your subjects feed."[9]
When we consider that the clergy held the third part of the soil of France and exacted a tithe of the produce of the rest, affecting to call this tithe a free-will offering, while they prosecuted forty thousand lawsuits to enforce it, we can see that the crash must come, and can understand why Church and State domination must go down together.
"During the eighteenth century men were speculating on religion, government, and society in a more daring way than they had ever speculated on so great a scale before. . . . This whole period, then, was one of very great importance, but it was mainly in the way of preparation for what was coming. . . . In most branches of art, learning, and original composition the eighteenth century was below either the times before or the times after it. It seemed as if the world needed to be stirred up by some such general crash as was now near at hand. . . . It was a time [the latter part of the century] which saw such an upsetting of the existing state of things everywhere as had never happened before in so short a space of time. . . . But in this general crash the evil of the older times was largely swept away as well as the good, and means were at least given for a better state of things to begin in our own time."[10]
VIII.— PAGE I15.
THIS topic is nowhere more finely treated than in Matheson's Growth of the Spirit of Christianity:—
"Let us marshal once again the testimonies of the past. We have seen the mind of man sleeping profoundly in China, dreaming wildlyin Brahma, reposing restlessly in Buddha, half-waking in Persia, fully conscious in Egypt, strongly active in Greece. Then we have seen the life of strength taken up into the life of sacrifice, the power to do transmuted into the power to suffer, and Paganism fading in the light of Christianity. Christianity itself we have beheld rising from very small beginnings: first, the infant that could only wonder; next, at the Pentecostal outpouring, the child learning to speak; then, in the home associations of Jerusalem, the child learning to feel. By and by we have seen these home associations broken, and Christianity driven forth to seek an enlarged sympathy and a wider brotherhood. We have seen the child's first guesses at truth, its first
experiences of worldly contact, and its first dreams of worldly .
ambition. We have marked how these dreams were disappointed in the very act of their fulfilment, and how the attainment of childhood's goal was the death of childhood's joy. Then we have followed the spirit of Christianity from the life of childhood into the life of school: have seen it first trained under the abbot, and afterwards under the rod of the Roman bishop. We have observed the gradual yet steady development of that
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- ↑ Exposition of the Prophecies and Promises made to the Church, ii. 327.
- ↑ History of Protestant Theology, ii. 443.
- ↑ The Law of the Offerings.
- ↑ Dr. Dorner: History of Protestant Theology, ii. 339.
- ↑ Dr. Dorner: A System of Christian Doctrine, ii. 205.
- ↑ Lecky: History of England in the Eighteenth Century, ii. 567-581.
- ↑ Abbey and Overton: The English Church in the Eighteenth Century, ii. 37.
- ↑ Kürtz, ii. 250.
- ↑ Lacombe: Petite Histoire du Peuple Français, p. 202.
- ↑ Edw. A. Freeman: General Sketch of History (Am. ed.), pp: 325-27.