the most needless." Locke said, "God, when he makes the prophet, does
not unmake the man." Swedenborg's history points the remark. The parish
disputes, in the Swedish church, between the friends and foes of Luther
and Melancthon, concerning "faith alone," and "works alone," intrude
themselves into his speculations upon the economy of the universe, and
of the celestial societies. The Lutheran bishop's son, for whom the
heavens are opened, so that he sees with eyes, and in the richest
symbolic forms, the awful truth of things, and utters again, in his
books, as under a heavenly mandate, the indisputable secrets of moral
nature,--with all these grandeurs resting upon him, remains the Lutheran
bishop's son; his judgments are those of a Swedish polemic, and his
vast enlargements purchased by adamantine limitations. He carries his
controversial memory with him, in his visits to the souls. He is like
Michel Angelo, who, in his frescoes, put the cardinal who had offended
him to roast under a mountain of devils; or, like Dante, who avenged,
in vindictive melodies, all his private wrongs; or, perhaps still more
like Montaigne's parish priest, who, if a hailstorm passes over the
village, thinks the day of doom has come, and the cannibals already
have got the pip. Swedenborg confounds us not less with the pains of
Melancthon, and Luther, and Wolfius, and his own books, which he
advertises among the angels.

Under the same theologic cramp, many of his dogmas are bound. His
cardinal position in morals is, that evils should be shunned as sins.
But he does not know what evil is, or what good is, who thinks any
ground remains to be occupied, after saying that evil is to be shunned
as evil. I doubt not he was led by the desire to insert the element
of personality of Deity. But nothing is added. One man, you say, dreads
crysipelas,--show him that this dread is evil: or, one dreads
hell,--show him that dread is evil. He who loves goodness, harbors