regular preacher, but the exercises of reading the Scriptures, prayers,
and selections from the Book of Worship were conducted by one of the lay
members. A manuscript sermon, by a clergyman of the order in Boston, was
read, and apparently listened to with much interest. It was well written
and deeply imbued with the doctrines of the church. I was impressed by
the gravity and serious earnestness of the little audience. There were
here no circumstances calculated to excite enthusiasm, nothing of the
pomp of religious rites and ceremonies; only a settled conviction of the
truth of the doctrines of their faith could have thus brought them
together. I could scarcely make the fact a reality, as I sat among them,
that here, in the midst of our bare and hard utilities, in the very
centre and heart of our mechanical civilization, were devoted and
undoubting believers in the mysterious and wonderful revelations of the
Swedish prophet,--revelations which look through all external and outward
manifestations to inward realities; which regard all objects in the world
of sense only as the types and symbols of the world of spirit; literally
unmasking the universe and laying bare the profoundest mysteries of life.

The character and writings of Emanuel Swedenborg constitute one of the
puzzles and marvels of metaphysics and psychology. A man remarkable for
his practical activities, an ardent scholar of the exact sciences, versed
in all the arcana of physics, a skilful and inventive mechanician, he has
evolved from the hard and gross materialism of his studies a system of
transcendent spiritualism. From his aggregation of cold and apparently
lifeless practical facts beautiful and wonderful abstractions start forth
like blossoms on the rod of the Levite. A politician and a courtier, a
man of the world, a mathematician engaged in the soberest details of the
science, he has given to the world, in the simplest and most natural
language, a series of speculations upon the great mystery of being:
detailed, matter-of-fact narratives of revelations from the spiritual