its converts quiet and orderly subjects, though its ultimate
consequences cannot be doubted. The army may as yet be depended upon,
the volunteers are fully equal to any service which may be required of
them, and the English people, by which denomination I mean, as
distinguishing them from the populace, that middle class from whom an
estimate of the national character is to be formed, have that wonderful
activity and courage, that unless the superiority of numbers against
them were more than tenfold, they would put out an insurrection, as they
put out a fire. They are a wonderful people. There is no occasion to cry
out _Aqui del Rey!_ (_Here for the king!_) in England. Should one man
draw his knife upon another in the streets, the passers-by do not shrug
up their shoulders and say, "It is _their_ business," and pass on,
letting murder be committed and the murderer escape. Every man in
England feels that it is _his_ business both to prevent a crime, and to
deliver up a criminal to justice.
The people then are the security of England against the populace; but
the tendency of the present system is to lessen the middle class and to
increase the lower ones; and there is also some danger that the people
may become dissatisfied with their rulers. There is no œconomy in the
administration of public affairs; prodigal governments must be needy,
and needy ones must be oppressive. The sum paid in taxation is beyond
what any other people ever paid to the state; the expenditure of the
state is almost incredible—for the last years of the war it exceeded a
million of English money per week. The peculation is in proportion to
the expenditure. They are now enquiring into these abuses; many have
been pointed out in the department of the admiralty, and no person
entertains a doubt but that they exist in every other department in an
equal degree. It is almost as dangerous to touch these abuses as to let
them continue;—but the alarm has been given, and upon this ground any
member of parliament, however little his influence and however despised
his talents, would, even if he stood alone, prove a far more formidable
opponent to any ministry, than ever Fox has been with all the great
families of the country, and all his own mighty powers. Any member who
should boldly and pertinaciously cry out that the public money was
peculated, bring forward his proofs, and perseveringly insist upon
investigation, would not long be without supporters. The people would
take up the cause: they can bear to have their money squandered, and can
even be made to take a pride in the magnitude of the expenditure, as
something magnificent, but they would not bear to have it pilfered;—and
should they be convinced that it is pilfered, which these examinations
if they be carried on must needs convince them of—should they be
provoked so far as to insist upon having all the ways and windings of
corruption laid open, and all the accounts well examined before the
bills are paid, I know not what lure would be strong enough to draw them
from the scent; and their governors would have reason to apprehend the
fate of Actæon.
The causes which may prevent revolution chiefly arise from France.
France expects to ruin England by its finances, forgetful with what
result that recipe for ruining an enemy has lately been tried by England
upon herself. The French do not know this wonderful people. It was
supposed that the existence of the English government depended upon the
bank, and that the bank would be ruined by an invasion: the thing was
tried; men were landed in Wales, away ran the Londoners to the bank to
exchange their bills for cash, and the stock of cash was presently
exhausted. What was the consequence? Why, when the Londoners found there
was no cash to be had, they began to consider whether they could not do
without it, mutually agreed to be contented with paper—and with paper
they have been contented ever since. The bank is infinitely obliged to
France for the experiment, and no persons suffer by it except the poor
sailors, who, when they receive their pay, put these bills in their
tobacco-boxes, and spoil them with a wet quid.
It is certain that the English government must adopt a strict system of
œconomy, thereby effectually preventing revolution by reform, or that
sooner or later a national bankruptcy must ensue—and to this France
hopes to drive them. But what would be the effect of national
bankruptcy?—not a revolution. The English have no fits of insanity: if
they saw the evil to be inevitable, they would immediately begin to
calculate and to compound, and see how it might be brought about with
the least mischief. Thousands would be ruined; but they who would be
benefited by the reduction of the taxes would be tens of thousands; so
that the majority would be satisfied at the time, and government begin
its accounts afresh, strong enough to take credit, if the people were
not disposed to give it. For this fact is apparent from all
history,—that the tendency of all political changes is ultimately to
strengthen the executive power. Forms may be altered—they who play for
authority may win and lose as rapidly as other gamesters, and perhaps at
more desperate stakes, but the uniform result is, that the government
becomes stronger. The National Convention carried decrees into effect
which Louis XIV. would not have dared to attempt—and Bonaparte has all
the strength of that convention rendered permanent by military power.
Whatever be the external form, the effect is the same; the people submit
implicitly to the directions of a single man, till he has riveted the
yoke upon their necks; or cheerfully obey the more rigid tyranny of
laws, because they conceive them to be of their own making.—A government
therefore with the forms of freedom, which could persuade the people
that it had no other object than their good, would be the strongest in
the world. The Spartans called themselves free, and boasted of their
obedience to institutions which changed the very nature of man.
In the language of modern politics a ministry has been considered as
synonymous with government, and government as synonymous with nation.
England made this error with regard to France, and France is now making
it with regard to England. Admit that the pressure of taxation should
occasion a national bankruptcy, and that this in its consequence should
bring about a revolution—England would be miserable at home; but would
she be less formidable abroad? She would not have a ship nor a sailor
the less; and if any circumstances were to awaken a military spirit in
the land of the Plantagenets, France, mighty as she is, might tremble
for her conquests. I do not believe that the fall of the funds would
produce any violent change in the government; and whether it did or not,
the enemies of England would do well to remember, that it would finally
strengthen the nation.
Bonaparte, whether at war or at peace, will endeavour to ruin the
commerce of England. As for what he can do by war, the English laugh at
him. The old saying of the cat and the adulterer holds equally true of
the smuggler; and a large portion of the world is out of reach of his
armies, but not out of reach of their merchant-ships. He will take the
surer method of establishing manufactories at home:—they smile at this
too. Manufactories are not to be created by edicts; and if they were, if
he could succeed in this, he would do precisely the best possible thing
which could be done for England in the best possible way:—first check
and then destroy a system, which there is now nothing to check, which
cannot be suddenly destroyed without great evil, and which, if it
continues to increase, will more effectually tend to ruin England than
all the might and all the machinations of its enemies, were they ten
times more formidable than they are.
That system certainly threatens the internal tranquillity, and
undermines the strength of the country. It communicates just knowledge
enough to the populace to make them dangerous, and it poisons their
morals. The temper of what is called the mob, that is, of this class of
people, has been manifested at the death of Despard, and there is no
reason to suppose that it is not the same in all other great towns as in
London. It will be well for England when her cities shall decrease, and
her villages multiply and grow; when there shall be fewer streets and
more cottages. The tendency of the present system is to convert the
peasantry into poor; her policy should be to reverse this, and to
convert the poor into peasantry, to increase them, and to enlighten
them; for their numbers are the strength, and their knowledge is the
security of states.
Ireland is the vulnerable part of the British empire: and till that
empire be restored to the true faith, it will always be vulnerable
there. Another conspiracy has just been formed there; the plan was to
seize the seat of government, and if the insurgents had not stopped to
perpetrate a useless murder upon the way, they would in all likelihood
have succeeded; the mails would that night have scattered their
proclamations over the whole island, and nine-tenths of the population
would have been instantly in rebellion. The exemplary attachment of the
Irish to the religion of their fathers is beyond all praise, and almost
beyond all example. Nothing but the complete re-establishment of that
religion can ever conciliate them to the English government, or reclaim
them from their present savage state, and the false hierarchy is too
well aware of the consequences ever to consent to this. Dagon knows what
would happen if the Ark of Truth were to be set up so near.
[9] One of these men has just been transported (Dec. 1806), having
remained in the Tower since his conviction, upon the allowance of a
state prisoner. His expences, it is to be hoped, are charged to the
nation among the _Extraordinaries_.—TR.
LETTER LXII.
_Account of Swedenborgianism._
I found my way one Sunday to the New Jerusalem, or Swedenborgian chapel.
It is singularly handsome, and its gallery fitted up like boxes at a
theatre. Few or none of the congregation belonged to the lower classes,
they seemed to be chiefly respectable tradesmen. The service was
decorous, and the singing remarkably good: but I have never in any other
heretical meeting heard heresy so loudly insisted upon. Christ in his
_divine_, or in his _glorified human_, was repeatedly addressed as the
only God; and the preacher laboured to show that the profane were those
who worshipped three Gods, and that their prayers, instead of a
sweet-smelling savour ascending to the throne of God, were an obscene
stink which offended his nostrils.
This is little remarkable in the civil, or, as his disciples would call
it, the human and terrestrial part of Emanuel Swedenborg's history. He
was born in 1689, at Stockholm, and was son of the bishop of
Ostrogothia. Charles XII. favoured him; Queen Ulrica ennobled him,
dignifying his name by elongation, as if in the patriarchal fashion,
from Swedberg to Swedenborg. It is certain that he was a man of science,
having been assessor of the Metallic College, and having published a
_Regnum Minerale_ in three volumes folio; but he abandoned the mineral
kingdom for a spiritual world of his own, the most extraordinary that
ever a crazy imagination created.[10]
His celestial history is more out of the common. I am copying from the
books of his believers when I tell you—that his interiors were opened by
the Lord; that he conversed with the dead, and with the very worst
devils without danger; that he spoke the angelic language, and respired
the angels' atmosphere; that for twenty-six years he was in the spirit,
and at the same time in the body; that he could let his spirit into the
body or out of the body at pleasure; that he had been in all the
planets, and in all the heavens, and had even descended into hell; that
the twelve apostles used to visit him; that a conspiracy of spirits was
formed against him; and that he was seized with a deadly disease in
consequence of a pestilential smoke which issued from Sodom and Egypt in
the spiritual world.
Enough of this. Let me try if it be possible to make his mythology
intelligible, and to draw out a map of his extra-mundane discoveries.
_Omnia quæ in cœlis, sunt in terris, terrestri modo; omnia quæ in
terris, sunt in cœlis, cœlesti modo._ All things which are in heaven are
upon earth, after an earthly manner; all things which are upon earth are
in heaven, after a heavenly manner.[11] So says Trismegistos, and who
will dispute the authority of the thrice-greatest Hermes?—The Scriptures
therefore cannot be understood without the science of correspondences; a
knowledge which the patriarchs possessed intuitively in the golden age,
which was preserved only scientifically in the silver age, became merely
speculative in the copper age, and in our iron generation has been
wholly lost. The Egyptian hieroglyphics are to be explained by this key,
which opens also all the mysteries of the ritual law. Job was the last
writer who possessed it, till it was revealed to the Swedish teacher.
There is nothing new in this, you tell me; it is the old notion of a
double meaning, the external and the internal, the literal and the
allegorical, the letter and the spirit. Not so, my good Father!
"Correspondence is the appearance of the internal in the external, and
its representation therein; there is a correspondence between all things
in heaven and all things in man; without correspondence with the
spiritual world nothing whatever could exist or subsist." You are
growing impatient!—I must give you a specimen of common language
interpreted by this science. Two legs stand for the will of God; by a
small piece of the ear we are to understand the will of truth; the son
of a she-ass denotes rational truth; and an ass, without any mention of
his pedigree, signifies the scientific principle—certainly no ill-chosen
emblem of such principles and such science as this. This is stark
nonsense, you say! My good father Antonio; "No distinct idea can be had
of correspondence without a previous knowledge concerning heaven as the
Great Man," or _Maximus Homo_, as we must call him, in the Master's own
words.
In sober serious explanation, Swedenborg seems to have thought upon one
text and dreamt upon it, till he mistook his dreams and his delirium for
revelation. "Let us make man in our image, after our likeness.—So God
created man in his own image, in the image of God created he him." His
system is a wild comment upon this passage, as monstrous as any of the
Rabinical reveries. Accordingly he lays it down as an axiom, that the
whole of divine order was imaged in man at the creation, insomuch that
he was divine order itself in a human form, and so Heaven in epitome.
Upon this he has built up a creed of the strangest anthropomorphism,
teaching that the divinity of the deity constitutes heaven, and that
heaven itself is in a human form, Deity and heaven thus identified being
the _Maximus Homo_, the Grand or Divine Man.
It has been one of the many fancies of hypothetical philosophers, that
all bodies are aggregates of living atoms. Admit this notion, and it
explains all the mysterious operations of life with perfect facility;
the little inhabitants of the secretory organs take each what they like
best, and thus manufacture all the animal materials. This is analogous
to the celestial system of Swedenborg, but with this difference, that
each constituent part and particle of his _Maximus Homo_ resembles the
whole in form, every society in this body corporate, and every
individual of each society being in the human shape divine.
Heaven is to be considered under the threefold distinction of general,
special, and particular—for Swedenborg had learnt to classify in his
earthly studies. Generally it is divided into two kingdoms, celestial
and spiritual; but I am sorry to add that, though I have studied the
anatomy of the Grand Man with some attention, I cannot discover where or
how these regions are separated. The specific division into three
heavens is more intelligible; the first is in the extremities, the
second or middle in the trunk, the third and highest in the head. The
particular division is into the societies of angels, who form the
constituent monads of this divine aggregate.
Every part, however, of the _Maximus Homo_ is not Heaven; at least the
inhabitants of every part are neither possessed of celestial goodness,
nor in that state of celestial enjoyment which seems essential to our
ideas of paradise. For instance, the parishioners of the kidneys, the
ureters, and the bladder, consist of such persons as in their mortal
state took a cruel delight in bringing others to justice; these people
speak with a harsh chattering voice, like magpies whose tongues have
been slit. They who have despised virtue and religion are in the
gall-bladder, a bitter destination no doubt! They also who dwell about
the _sphincter vesicæ_, amuse themselves by tormenting the evil spirits.
Whether they are purged of this malignant disposition by the secretions
and excretions which are going on in their vicinity, this new Emanuel
sayeth not. A purgatory indeed there is, and a truly curious one! They
who are still unclean in thoughts and affections are stationed in the
colon; not as component parts of the Grand Man—of that honour they are
not yet worthy; they are there as his aliment, to be concocted and
digested, and after the gross fæces have been cast out, filtered through
lacteals and arteries into chyle and blood, till they are taken up into
the system and embodied. They who are defiled with earthly dregs are in
the small-guts; the most impure of all in the neck of the bladder and in
the rectum, both which have below them a most dreadful and filthy hell,
ready to receive their contents,
E recolher o mais sobejo e impuro
Da immundicia de toda a obra lançada.[12]
This +Ouranos+, or _Maximus Homo_, seems to be the body of Deity; and
the Divine Life or Spirit, like the gifted spirit of Swedenborg himself,
can be in or out, separate from, or identified with it, at pleasure.
Accordingly, though the angels are in him, and actually are he, yet they
visibly behold him, as the sun of their world. Now the Lord in person
being the sun, the light and heat which proceed from him must
necessarily partake of divinity; accordingly light in Heaven is divine
truth, and heat is divine love: a thin and transparent vapour, which
surrounds the angels like an atmosphere, enables them to sustain this
influx of Deity. An atmosphere of this kind, which is called the Sphere
of Life, exhales from every man, spirit and angel; it is the emanation
of the vital affections and thoughts. In Heaven, of course, it is
volatile essence of love, and each angel is sensibly affected when he
gets within the sphere of another. We on earth feel the same influence,
though unconscious of the cause, for this hypothesis physically accounts
for the sympathies of dislike and of affection.—The Deity is also the
celestial moon, and this sun and moon are seen at the same time, one
before the right eye, and the other before the left. Let an angel turn
his face which way he will, this sun is always before him, and he always
fronts the east; yet at the same time he can see the other quarters by
an inward kind of vision, like that of thought. A precious olla podrida
this of allegorical riddles and downright nonsense!
The œconomy of the angels is more rationally imagined, and is better
suited to our worldly habits, or suited to better worldly habits than
Elysium, or Valhalla, or the Sorgon, the Paradise of Mohammed, or the
ever-blessed state of Nireupan to which the Yogue approximates when he
has looked at nothing for seven years but the tip of his own nose. You
are not to conceive of angels as of disembodied spirits; they are
material beings, though of a finer matter. They wear garments white, or
flame-coloured, or shining, with which they are supplied by the Deity;
only the angels of the third Heaven, being in the state of innocence
made perfect, are naked. They dwell in houses, which are arranged in
streets and squares, like our cities on earth; but every thing there is
on a nobler scale, and of more magnificence. Swedenborg frequently
walked through these cities, and visited the inhabitants; he saw palaces
there, the roofs of which glittered as if with pure gold, and the floors
as if with precious stones: the gardens are on the south side, where
trees with leaves like silver produce fruits resembling gold, and the
flowers are so arranged as by their colours to represent rainbows.—There
is no space in Heaven, or, more accurately speaking, no such thing as
distance: where angels wish to be, there they are; locomotion is
accomplished by the mere act of volition; and, what is better still, if
one angel earnestly desires the company of another, the wish attracts
him, and he immediately appears.
There is a room in the southern quarter of the spiritual world the walls
of which shine like gold; and in this room is a table, and on this table
lies the Bible, set with jewels. Whenever this book is opened a light of
inexpressible brilliancy flows from it, and the jewels send forth rays
which arch it over with a rainbow. When an angel of the third Heaven
comes and opens it, the ground of this rainbow appears crimson; to one
from the second Heaven it is blue; to one of the first or lowest Heaven
the light is variegated and veined like marble. But if one approaches
who has ever falsified the word, the brightness disappears, and the book
itself seems covered with blood, and warns him to depart, lest he suffer
for his presumption.
There is public worship in Heaven, which Swedenborg attended, and heard
sermons: they have books both written and printed; he was able to read
them, but could seldom, he says, pick out any meaning; from which I
conclude that he has successfully copied their style. Writing flows from
the thoughts of the angels, or with their thoughts, appearing so
coinstantaneously as if thought cast itself upon the paper; but as this
writing is not permanent, it seems that pen and ink might usefully be
introduced among them. The language of Heaven is like the writing,
connate with thought, being indeed nothing more than thinking audibly.
Its construction is curiously explained; the vowels express the
affections; the consonants the particular ideas derived from the
affections, and the words the whole sense of the matter. The angelic
alphabet resembles the Chinese, for every letter signifies a complete
thing,—which is the reason why the hundred and nineteenth psalm is
alphabetically divided;—and every letter, and every flexure and
curvature of every letter, contains some secret of wisdom. Different
dialects of this language are spoken in the celestial and spiritual
kingdoms; the celestials chiefly using the vowels U and O, the
spirituals preferring E and I; the speech of the former resembles a
smooth flowing water, that of the latter the sound of a running stream
broken on its way. But the most enviable power connected with expression
which the angels possess, is, that they represent their ideas in a thin
undulating circumfluent fluid or ether, so that they can make thought
visible.