ith solid fact than that he
should be inspired by God to reveal a world of mysterious truths.
Furthermore, while we are impressed with the reasonableness,
probability, and consistency of most of the general principles of
Swedenborg's exposition of the future life, we cannot but shrink
from many of the details and forms in which he carries them out.
Notwithstanding the earnest avowals of able disciples of his
school that all his details are strictly necessitated by his
premises, and that all his premises are laws of truth, we are
compelled to regard a great many of his assertions as purely
arbitrary and a great many of his descriptions as purely fanciful.
But, denying that his scheme of eschatology is a scientific
representation of the reality, and looking at it as a poetic
structure reared by co working knowledge and imagination on the
ground of reason, nature, and morality, whose foundation walls,
columns, and grand outlines are truth, while many of its details,
ornaments, and images are fancy, it must be acknowledged to be one
of the most wonderful examples of creative power extant in the
literature of the world. No one who has mastered it with
appreciative mind will question this. There are, expressed and
latent, in the totality of Swedenborg's accounts of hell and
heaven, more variety of imagery, power of moral truth and appeal,
exhibition of dramatic justice, transcendent delights of holiness
and love, curdling terrors of evil and woe, strength of
philosophical grasp, and sublimity of emblematic conception, than
are to be found in Dante's earth renowned poem. We say this of the
substance of his ideas, not of the shape and clothing in which
they are represented. Swedenborg was no poet in language and form,
only in conception.

Take this picture. In the topmost height of the celestial world
the Lord appears as a sun, and all the infinite multitudes of
angels, swarming up through the innumerable heavens, wherever they
are, continually turn their faces towards him in love and joy. But
at the bottom of the infernal world is a vast ball of blackness,
towards which all the hosts of demons, crowding down through the
successive hells, forever turn their eager faces away from God. Or
consider this. Every thing consists of a great number of perfect
leasts like itself: every heart is an aggregation of little
hearts, every lung an aggregation of little lungs, every eye an
aggregation of little eyes. Following out the princi