§ 170.5. =Swedenborgianism.=--=Emanuel von Swedenborg= was born at Stockholm, in A.D. 1688, son of the strict Lutheran bishop of West Gothland, Jasper Swedberg. He was appointed assessor of the School of Mines at Stockholm, and soon showed himself to be a man of encyclopædic information and of speculative ability. After long examination of the secrets of nature, in a condition of magnetic ecstasy, in which he thought that he had intercourse with spirits, sometimes in heaven, sometimes in hell, he became convinced, in A.D. 1743, that he was called by these revelations to restore corrupted Christianity by founding a church of the New Jerusalem as the finally perfected church. He published the apocalyptic revelations as a new gospel: “_Arcana Cœlestia in Scr. s. Detecta_,” in seven vols.; “_Vera Chr. Rel._,” two vols. After his death, in A.D. 1772, his “_Vera Christiana Religio_” was translated into Swedish, but his views never got much hold in his native country. They spread more widely in England, where John Clowes, rector of St. John’s Church, Manchester, translated his writings, and himself wrote largely in their exposition and commendation. Separate congregations with their own ministers, and forms of worship, sprang up through England in A.D. 1788, and soon there were as many as fifty throughout the country. From England the New Church spread to America.--In Germany it was specially throughout Württemberg that it found adherents. There, in A.D. 1765, Oetinger (§ 171, 9) recognised Swedenborg’s revelations, and introduced many elements from them into his theosophical system.--Swedenborg’s religious system was speculative mysticism, with a physical basis and rationalizing results. The aim of religion with him is the opening of an intimate correspondence between the spiritual world and man, and giving an insight into the mystery of the connexion between the two. The Bible (excluding the apostolic epistles, as merely expository), pre-eminently the Apocalypse, is recognised by him as God’s word; to be studied, however, not in its literal but in its spiritual or inner sense. Of the church dogmas there is not one which he did not either set aside or rationalistically explain away. He denounces in the strongest terms the church doctrine of the Trinity. God is with him only one Person, who manifests Himself in three different forms: the Father is the principle of the manifesting God; the Son, the manifested form; the Spirit, the manifested activity. The purpose of the manifestation of Christ is the uniting of the human and Divine; redemption is nothing more than the combating and overcoming of the evil spirits. But angels and devils are spirits of dead men glorified and damned. He did not believe in a resurrection of the flesh, but maintained that the spiritual form of the body endures after death. The second coming of Christ will not be personal and visible, but spiritual through a revelation of the spiritual sense of Holy Scripture, and is realized by the founding of the church of the New Jerusalem.[515]