The Gist of Swedenborg | Page 2

became his Divinely appointed work. He forwent his reputation as a man of science, gave up his assessorship, cleared his desk of everything but the Scriptures. He beheld in the Word of God a spiritual meaning, as he did a spiritual world in the world of phenomena. In revealing both of these the Lord, he said, made His Second Coming. For the rest of his long life Swedenborg gave himself with unremitting labor but with a saving calm to this commanding cause, publishing his great Latin volumes of Scripture interpretation and of theological teaching at Amsterdam or London, at first anonymously, and distributing them to clergy and universities. The titles of his principal theological works appear in the following compilation from them. Upon his death-bed this herald of a new day for Christianity solemnly affirmed the reality of his experience and the reception by him of his teaching from the Lord.
Swedenborg died in London, March 29, 1772. In 1908 his remains were removed from the Swedish Church in that city to the cathedral at Upsala, where they lie in a monument erected to his memory by the Swedish Parliament.
WILLIAM F. WUNSCH.
Documents Concerning the Life and Character of Swedenborg (3 vols.) 1875-1877, R.L. Tafel, is the main collection of biographical material; _The Life and Mission of Emanuel Swedenborg_, 1883, Benjamin Worcester, and _Emanuel Swedenborg, His Life, Teachings and Influence_, 1907, George Trobridge, are two of the better known biographies.

THE GIST OF SWEDENBORG
"At this day nothing but the self-evidenced reason of love will re-establish the Church."--_Canons_, Prologue.

GOD THE LORD
"Believe in God: believe also in Me."
_John_, XIV, 1
"My Lord, and my God!"
_John_, XX, 28
ONE AND INFINITE
God is One, and Infinite. The true quality of the Infinite does not appear; for the human mind, however highly analytical and exalted, is itself finite, and the finiteness in it cannot be laid aside. It is not fitted, therefore, to see the Infinity of God, and thus God, as He is in Himself, but can see God from behind in shadow; as it is said of Moses, when he asked to see God, that he was placed in a cleft of the rock, and saw His hinder side. It is enough to acknowledge God from things finite, that is, created, in which He is infinitely.
--_True Christian Religion, n._ 28
"INTO HIS MARVELLOUS LIGHT"
We read in the Word that Jehovah God dwells in light inaccessible. Who, then, could approach Him, unless He had come to dwell in accessible light, that is, unless He had descended and assumed a Humanity and in it had become the Light of the world? Who cannot see that to approach Jehovah the Father in His light is as impossible as to take the wings of the morning and to fly with them to the sun?
--_True Christian Religion, n._ 176
THE CHRIST-GOD
We ought to have faith in God the Saviour, Jesus Christ, because that is faith in the visible God in Whom is the Invisible; and faith in the visible God, Who is at once Man and God, enters into man. For while faith is spiritual in essence it is natural in form, for everything spiritual, in order to be anything with a man, is received by him in what is natural.
--_True Christian Religion, n._ 339
Man's conjunction with the Lord is not with His supreme Divine Being itself, but with His Divine Humanity, and by this with the supreme Divine Being; for man can have no idea whatever of the supreme Divine Being of the Lord, utterly transcending his thought as it does; but of His Divine Human Being he can have an idea. Hence the Gospel according to John says that no one has at any time seen God except the only-begotten Son, and that there is no approach to the Father save by Him. For the same reason He is called a Mediator.
--_Arcana Coelestia, n._ 4211
GOD-MAN
In the Lord, God and Man are not two but one Person, yea, altogether one, as soul and body are. This is plain in many of the Lord's own utterances; as that the Father and He are one; that all things of the Father are His, and all His the Father's; that He is in the Father, and the Father in Him; that all things are given into His hand; that He has all power; that whosoever believes in Him has eternal life; that He is God of heaven and earth.
--_Doctrine Concerning the Lord, n._ 60
There is one God, and the Lord is He, His Divinity and Humanity being one Person.
--_Divine Providence, n._ 122
They who think of the Lord's Humanity, and not at the same time of His Divinity, by no means allow the expression "Divine Humanity"; for they think of the Humanity by itself and of the Divinity by itself, which is like thinking of man apart from