Religion: Swedenborgians

Why do people marry? Not—so the Rev. Paul Dresser of Bath, Maine, aroused the National Council of Swedenborgian Ministers, meeting at Cincinnati, last week, by telling them—not solely for the procreation of children. “Marriage itself, in its purity, is the precious jewel of the Christian religion, and is heaven on earth.” Mr. Dresser went on to quote Mrs. Margaret Sanger on the race of morons which is threatening our civilization. Said he: ”God only knows, how many hundreds of thousands, if not millions, of children are born every year, of whom it could truthfully be said, as of Judas, ‘it had been good for them if they had not been born.”

Except for Mr. Dresser’s provocative paper on Birth Control—a subject now agitating several churches—the annual Swedenborgian convention was uneventful. But this proved sufficient cause to recapture from historical lore the name by which this smallest of sects is known: Emmanuel Swedenborg, of Sweden, who was poet, mystic, mathematician, physician, statesman, inventor—almost everything but a Malthusian.*

Da Vinci himself could not look down on him; Franklin’s achievements cover a narrower range. There was nothing he could not do, nothing he did not do—in the early 1700’s.

Did the lack of boats and galleys face Charles XII† of Sweden with disaster at the siege of Frederikshall? Emmanuel Swedenborg invented a machine to transport them overland. Did youths need verses in Latin for ladies? They applied to Swedenborg. Did house chimneys smoke or the deaf suffer? Swedenborg cured the chimneys and gave the deaf an ear trumpet. Did the world need an interpretation of the Scriptures? Swedenborg furnished one.

He produced a report on smelting and assaying which was a masterpiece of detail; he guided Sweden in its currency policy, dealt with the balance of trade and the liquor laws, ancestored all Scandinavian geologists, arrived at the nebular hypothesis to explain the formation of planets long before Kant and LaPlace, was an original chemist, sketched a flying machine.

But with all this done and learned, life still lay flat and unpalatable on Swedenborg’s tongue. He sought, like Paracelsus, the infinite and the spiritual ; and neither geometrical, nor physical, nor metaphysical principles led him to them. But they must be found. And so to work on a new path. Then, in 1745, “heaven was opened to him” by direct spiritual revelation from. God.

The essence of Swedenborg’s account of his revelation is that things spiritual have their counterpart in things physical. From God emanates a divine sphere, which appears in the spiritual world as a sun, and from this spiritual sun again proceeds the sun of the natural world. In God there are three infinite “degrees” of being, and in man and all things corresponding, three finite and created degrees. They are love, wisdom, use; or end, cause, and effect. The final ends of all things are in the Divine Mind; the causes of all things are in the spiritual world, and their effects in the natural world.

— Thomas Robert Malthus, whose theories of population formed the bases of modern Birth Control.

† Charles XII, King of Sweden (1697-1718), lost to Sweden, by obstinate and unnecessary warring against the European Powers and Peter the Great of Russia, Baltic provinces stretching from Stettin to Reval, and in so doing reduced his country from the rank of a first-class power.