might now be willing to allow that the exegetic pages which sentence by
sentence were so brilliantly suggestive, had sometimes a collective
opacity which the most resolute vision could not penetrate. He put into
this dark wisdom the most brilliant intelligence ever brought to the
service of his mystical faith; he lighted it up with flashes of the
keenest wit and bathed it in the glow of a lambent humor, so that it is
truly wonderful to me how it should remain so unintelligible. But I have
only tried to read certain of his books, and perhaps if I had persisted
in the effort I might have found them all as clear at last as the one
which seems to me the clearest, and is certainly most encouragingly
suggestive: I mean the one called 'Society the Redeemed Form of Man.'

He had his whole being in his belief; it had not only liberated him from
the bonds of the Calvinistic theology in which his youth was trammelled,
but it had secured him against the conscious ethicism of the prevailing
Unitarian doctrine which supremely worshipped Conduct; and it had colored
his vocabulary to such strange effects that he spoke of moral men with
abhorrence; as more hopelessly lost than sinners. Any one whose sphere
tempted him to recognition of the foibles of others, he called the Devil;
but in spite of his perception of such diabolism, he was rather fond of
yielding to it, for he had a most trenchant tongue. I myself once fell
under his condemnation as the Devil, by having too plainly shared his joy
in his characterization of certain fellow-men; perhaps a group of
Bostonians from whom he had just parted and whose reciprocal pleasure of
themselves he presented in the image of "simmering in their own fat and
putting a nice brown on each other."

Swedenborg himself he did not spare as a man. He thought that very
likely his life had those lapses in it which some of his followers deny;
and he regarded him on the aesthetical side as essentially commonplace,