1827.

How natural it is to mistake the weakness of an adversary’s arguments for the strength of our own cause!  This is especially applicable to Mr. Noble’s Appeal.  Assuredly as far as Mr. Beaumont’s Notes are concerned, his victory is complete.

Sect.  IV. .

The intellectual spirit is moving upon the chaos of minds, which ignorance and necessity have thrown into collision and confusion; and the result will be a new creation.  “Nature” (to use the nervous language of an-old writer,) “will be melted down and recoined; and all will be bright and beautiful.”

Alas! if this be possible now, or at any time henceforward, whence came the dross?  If nature be bullion that can be melted and thus purified by the conjoint action of heat and elective attraction, I pray Mr. Noble to tell me to what name or ‘genus’ he refers the dross?  Will he tell me, to the Devil?  Whence came the Devil?  And how was the pure bullion so thoughtlessly made as to have an elective affinity for this Devil?

Sect.  V. .

The next anecdote that I shall adduce is similar in its nature to the last .  The relater is Dr. Stilling, Counsellor at the Court of the Duke of Baden, in a work entitled ‘Die Theorie der Geister-Kunde’, printed in 1808.

Mr. Noble is a man of too much English good sense to have relied on Sung’s (’alias’ Dr. Stilling’s) testimony, had he ever read the work in which this passage is found.  I happen to possess the work; and a more anile, credulous, solemn fop never existed since the days of old Audley.  It is strange that Mr. Noble should not have heard, that these three anecdotes were first related by Immanuel Kant, and still exist in his miscellaneous writings.

Ib. .

“Can he be a sane man who records the subsequent reverie as matter of fact?  The Baron informs us, that on a certain night a man appeared to him in the midst of a strong shining light, and said, ’I am God the Lord, the Creator and Redeemer; I have chosen thee to explain to men the interior and spiritual sense of the Sacred Writings:  I will dictate to thee what thou oughtest to write?’ From this period, the Baron relates he was so illumined, as to behold, in the clearest manner, what passed in the spiritual world, and that he could converse with angels and spirits as with men,” &c.

I remember no such passage as this in Swedenborg’s works.  Indeed it is virtually contradicted by their whole tenor.  Swedenborg asserts himself to relate ’visa et audita’, ­his own experience, as a traveller and visitor of the spiritual world, ­not the words of another as a mere ‘amanuensis’.  But altogether this Gulielmus must be a silly Billy.

Ib. .

The Apostolic canon in such cases is, ’Believe not every spirit, but try the spirits whether they be of God’. (1 John i.) And the touchstone to which they are to be brought is pointed out by the Prophet:  ’To the law and to the testimony:  if they speak not according to this word, it is because there is no truth in them.’ (Is. vii.) But instead of this canon you offer another .  It is simply this:  Whoever professes to be the bearer of divine communications, is insane.  To bring Swedenborg within the operation of this rule, you quote, as if from his own works, a passage which is nowhere to be found in them, but which you seem to have taken from some biographical dictionary or cyclopaedia; few or none of which give anything like a fair account of the matter.

Aye! my memory did not fail me, I find.  As to insanity in the sense intended by Gulielmus, namely, as ’mania’, ­I should as little think of charging Swedenborg with it, as of calling a friend mad who laboured under an ‘acyanoblepsia’.

Ib. .

Did you never read of one who says, in words very like your version of the Baron’s reverie:  ’It came to pass, that, as I took my journey, and was come nigh unto Damascus, about noon, suddenly there shone from heaven a great light round about me:  and I fell on the ground, and heard a voice saying unto me, Saul, Saul, why persecutest thou me?’

In the short space of four years the newspapers contained three several cases, two of which I cut out, and still have among my ocean of papers, and which, as stated, were as nearly parallel, in external accompaniments, to St. Paul’s as cases can well be: ­struck with lightning, ­heard the thunder as an articulate voice, ­blind for a few days, and suddenly recovered their sight.  But then there was no Ananias, no confirming revelation to another.  This it was that justified St. Paul as a wise man in regarding the incident as supernatural, or as more than a providential omen.  N. B. Not every revelation requires a sensible miracle as the credential; but every revelation of a new series of ‘credenda’.  The prophets appealed to records of acknowledged authority, and to their obvious sense literally interpreted.  The Baptist needed no miracle to attest his right of calling sinners to repentance.  See ‘Exodus’ i.

Ib. pp. 346, 7.

This sentiment, that miracles are not the proper evidences of doctrinal truth, is, assuredly, the decision of the Truth itself; as is obvious from many passages in Scripture.  We have seen that the design of the miracles of Moses, as external performances, was not to instruct the Israelites in spiritual subjects, but to make them obedient subjects of a peculiar species of political state.  And though the miracles of Jesus Christ collaterally served as testimonies to his character, he repeatedly intimates that this was not their main design. At another time more plainly still, he says, that it is ‘a wicked and adulterous generation’ (that) ‘seeketh after a sign’; on which occasion, according to Mark, ‘he sighed deeply in his spirit’.  How characteristic is that touch of the Apostle, ’The Jews require a sign, and the Greeks seek after wisdom!’ (where by wisdom he means the elegance and refinement of Grecian literature.)

Agreeing, as in the main I do, with the sentiments here expressed by this eloquent writer, I must notice that he has, however, mistaken the sense of the [Greek:  saemeion], which the Jews would have tempted our Saviour to shew, ­namely, the signal for revolt by openly declaring himself their king, and leading them against the Romans.  The foreknowledge that this superstition would shortly hurry them into utter ruin caused the deep sigh, ­as on another occasion, the bitter tears.  Again, by the [Greek:  sophia] of the Greeks their disputatious [Greek:  sophistikae] is meant.  The sophists pretended to teach wisdom as an art:  and ‘sophistae’ may be literally rendered, wisdom-mongers, as we say, iron-mongers.

Ib. .

Some probably will say, “What argument can induce us to believe a man in a concern of this nature who gives no visible credentials to his authority?” But let us ask in return, “Is it worthy of a being wearing the figure of a man to require such proofs as these to determine his judgment?” “The beasts act from the impulse of their bodily senses, but are utterly incapable of seeing from reason why they should so act:  and it might easily be shewn, that while a man thinks and acts under the influence of a miracle, he is as much incapable of perceiving from any rational ground why he should thus think and act, as a beast is.”  “What!” our opponents will perhaps reply, “Was it not by miracles that the prophets (some of them) testified their authority?  Do you not believe these facts?” Yes, my friends, I do most entirely believe them, &c.

There is so much of truth in all this reasoning on miracles, that I feel pain in the thought that the result is false, ­because it was not the whole truth.  But this is the grounding, and at the same time pervading, error of the Swedenborgians; ­that they overlook the distinction between congruity with reason, truth of consistency, or internal possibility of this or that being objectively real, and the objective reality as fact.  Miracles, ‘quoad’ miracles, can never supply the place of subjective evidence, that is, of insight.  But neither can subjective insight supply the place of objective sight.  The certainty of the truth of a mathematical arch can never prove the fact of its existence.  I anticipate the answers; but know that they likewise proceed from the want of distinguishing between ideas, such as God, Eternity, the responsible Will, the Good, and the like, ­the actuality of which is absolutely subjective, and includes both the relatively subjective and the relatively objective as higher or transcendant realities, which alone are the proper objects of faith, the great postulates of reason in order to its own admission of its own being, ­the not distinguishing, I say, between these, and those positions which must be either matters of fact or fictions.  For such latter positions it is that miracles are required in lieu of experience.  A.’s testimony of experience supplies the want of the same experience for B. C. D., &c.  For example, how many thousands believe the existence of red snow on the testimony of Captain Parry!  But who can expect more than hints in a marginal note?

Sect.  VI. pp. 378, 9; 380, 1.

In the general views, then, which are presented in the writings of Swedenborg on the subject of Heaven and Hell, as the abodes, respectively, of happiness and of misery, while there certainly is not anything which is not in the highest degree agreeable both to reason and Scripture, there also seems nothing which could be deemed inconsistent with the usual conceptions of the Christian world.

What tends to render thinking readers a little sceptical, is the want of a distinct boundary between the deductions from reason, and the articles, the truth of which is to rest on the Baron’s personal testimony, his ‘visa et audita’.  Nor is the Baron himself (as it appears to me) quite consistent on this point.

Ib. .

  Witness, again, the poet Milton, who introduces active sports among
  the recreations which he deemed worthy of angels, and (strange indeed
  for a Puritan!) included even dancing among the number.

How could a man of Noble’s sense and sensibility bring himself thus to profane the awful name of Milton, by associating it with the epithet “Puritan?”

I have often thought of writing a work to be entitled ’Vindiciae Heterodoxae, sive celebrium virorum [Greek:  paradogmatizonton] defensio’; that is, Vindication of Great Men unjustly branded; and at such times the names prominent to my mind’s eye have been Giordano Bruno, Jacob Behmen, Benedict Spinoza, and Emanuel Swedenborg.  Grant, that the origin of the Swedenborgian theology is a problem; yet on which ever of the three possible hypotheses ­(possible I mean for gentlemen, scholars and Christians) ­it may be solved –­namely: 

1.  Swedenborg’s own assertion and constant belief in the hypothesis of a supernatural illumination; or,

2. that the great and excellent man was led into this belief by becoming the subject of a very rare, but not (it is said) altogether unique, conjunction of the somniative faculty (by which the products of the understanding, that is to say, words, conceptions and the like, are rendered instantaneously into forms of sense) with the voluntary and other powers of the waking state; or,

3. the modest suggestion that the first and second may not be so incompatible as they appear ­still it ought never to be forgotten that the merit and value of Swedenborg’s system do only in a very secondary degree depend on any one of the three.  For even though the first were adopted, the conviction and conversion of such a believer must, according to a fundamental principle of the New Church, have been wrought by an insight into the intrinsic truth and goodness of the doctrines, severally and collectively, and their entire consonance with the light of the written and of the eternal word, that is, with the Scriptures and with the sciential and the practical reason.  Or say that the second hypothesis were preferred, and that by some hitherto unexplained affections of Swedenborg’s brain and nervous system, he from the year 1743, thought and reasoned through the ‘medium’ and instrumentality of a series of appropriate and symbolic visual and auditual images, spontaneously rising before him, and these so clear and so distinct, as at length to overpower perhaps his first suspicions of their subjective nature, and to become objective for him, that is, in his own belief of their kind and origin, ­still the thoughts, the reasonings, the grounds, the deductions, the facts illustrative, or in proof, and the conclusions, remain the same; and the reader might derive the same benefit from them as from the sublime and impressive truths conveyed in the Vision of Mirza or the Tablet of Cebes.  So much even from a very partial acquaintance with the works of Swedenborg, I can venture to assert; that as a moralist Swedenborg is above all praise; and that as a naturalist, psychologist, and theologian, he has strong and varied claims on the gratitude and admiration of the professional and philosophical student. ­April 1827.

P. S. Notwithstanding all that Mr. Noble says in justification of his arrangement, it is greatly to be regretted that the contents of this work are so confusedly tossed together.  It is, however, a work of great merit.