ely 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. p. 434.

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