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

why it is written (Exodus xix. 12, 21-28), ‘‘Set bounds unto the people round about [the Mount]... lest they break through . . . and many of them perish.” And again (Hxodus xxxiyv. 29-35), ‘‘When Moses came down with the two tables of testimony, the skin of his face shone, and Moses put a veil upon his face till he had done speaking with the people.”’ The Transfiguration of Jesus Christ also testifies to the light shed by a messenger from heaven and the extreme joy of the angels in beiag forever bathed in it. ‘‘His

?

face,’’ says Saint Matthew (xvii. 2), ‘‘did shine as the sun, and His raiment was as white as the light . . . and a bright cloud overshadowed the disciples.’’’

‘‘When a planet is inhabited only by beings who reject the Lord and misprize His Word, when the angelic spirits have gathered from the four winds, God sends a destroying angel to alter the whole mass of that rebellious world, which, in the vast spaces of the universe, is to Him what an infertile seed is in the natural world. As he approaches that globe, the destroying angel, riding on a cornet, reverses it on its axis and makes the continents become the bottom of the sea, the highest mountains then are islands, and the lands hitherto covered by the seas reappear in all their freshness, obeying the laws of Genesis; thus the Word of God is in power once more on a new earth, which everywhere shows the effects of terrestrial waters and celestial fires. The light the angel brings down from heaven makes the sun pale. Then, as Isaiah saith (ii. 10, 19), men will enter into the holes of the rocks and hide themselves in the dust. ‘They will cry to the mountains and rocks, Fall on us, and bide us from the wrath of the Lamb’ (Rev. vi. 16). The Lamb is the great emblem of the angels who are unrecognized and persecuted on earth.

p. 80

“Christ Himself hath said, ‘Blessed are they that mourn! Blessed are the meek! Blessed are the peacemakers.’ Ali Swedenborg is there: Suffer, believe, and love. To love truly, must we not have suffered; must we not believe? Love begets strength, and strength gives wisdom; this is intelligence, for strength and wisdom include will. Is not true intellect composed of knowledge, will, and wisdom, the three attributes of the angelic spirit?

‘‘*Tf the universe has a meaning, that surely is the worthiest of God,’ said Monsieur Saint-Martin to me when I saw him during his visit to Sweden.

‘‘But,’’ the minister went on, after a pause, ‘‘of what value can these shreds be, snatched from a work so vast that the only way to give you an idea of it is to compare it to a river of light, a torrent of flame? When a man plunges into it, he is carried away by an overwhelming flood. Dante Alighieri’s poem seems a mere speck to the reader who will dive into the innumerable passages in which Swedenborg has given actuality to the heavenly spheres, just as Beethoven builds up palaces of harmony out of thousands of notes, and architects construct cathedrals of thousands of stones. He flings you up to infinite heights, where your mind sometimes fails to bear you up. It is necessary certainly to have a powerful brain if you are to come back sane _ and safe to our social notions.