Louis Lambert — Honoré de Balzac, trans. Katharine Prescott Wormeley

‘But,’ his disciples argue, ‘though such substances are sparely distributed in this world, is that any reason why they should pot be abundant in another? On earth they are but earthly, while in heaven they are seen under celestial aspects in relation to the angelic state.’ And Swedenborg would quote on such points the great words of Jesus Christ, ‘If I have told you earthly things and ye believe not, how shall ye believe if I tell you of heavenly things?’ (John iii. 12.)

“T, sir, have read Swedenborg from beginning to end,”’ the pastor went on, with an emphatic gesture. ‘‘I may say it with pride, since { have preserved my reason. As you read you must either lose your wits or become a seer. Though I have escaped both forms of madness, I have often felt unknown raptures, deep amazement, inward joy such as can only come of the fulness of truth, the evidence of heavenly illumination. Everything here below shrinks, dwindles, as the soul studies the burning pages of those writings. It is impossible not to be struck with astonishment on reflecting that within the space of thirty years this man published twenty-five quarto volumes on the truths of the spiritual world, written in Latin, the shortest containing five hundred pages, and all in small print. He left twenty more, it is said, in London, in the care of his nephew, M. Silverichm, formerly chaplain to the King of Sweden. Certainly the man who, between twenty and sixty, spent himself in publishing a sort of encyclopedia, must have had supernatural help to enable him to compose these prodigious treatises, at an age when the powers of man are beginning to fail.

p. 68

“Tn these works there are thousands of propositions, all numbered, none of them contradictory. Method, preciseness, and a collected mind are everywhere conspicuous, all based on the one fact of the existence of angels. His ‘True Religion,’ in which his whole dogma is summed up, is a work of powerful lucidity, and was conceived and carried out when he was eighty-three years of age. His ubiquity, his omniscience, have indeed never been disproved by his critics or his enemies.