Ib. p. 350.

Some probably will say, “What argument can induce us to believe a man in a concern of this nature who gives no visible credentials to his authority?” * * * But let us ask in return, “Is it worthy of a being wearing the figure of a man to require such proofs as these to determine his judgment?” * * * “The beasts act from the impulse of their bodily senses, but are utterly incapable of seeing from reason why they should so act:  and it might easily be shewn, that while a man thinks and acts under the influence of a miracle, he is as much incapable of perceiving from any rational ground why he should thus think and act, as a beast is.”  “What!” our opponents will perhaps reply, * * * “Was it not by miracles that the prophets (some of them) testified their authority?  Do you not believe these facts?” Yes, my friends, I do most entirely believe them, &c.

There is so much of truth in all this reasoning on miracles, that I feel pain in the thought that the result is false,—­because it was not the whole truth.  But this is the grounding, and at the same time pervading, error of the Swedenborgians;—­that they overlook the distinction between congruity with reason, truth of consistency, or internal possibility of this or that being objectively real, and the objective reality as fact.  Miracles, ‘quoad’ miracles, can never supply the place of subjective evidence, that is, of insight.  But neither can subjective insight supply the place of objective sight.  The certainty of the truth of a mathematical arch can never prove the fact of its existence.  I anticipate the answers; but know that they likewise proceed from the want of distinguishing between ideas, such as God, Eternity, the responsible Will, the Good, and the like,—­the actuality of which is absolutely subjective, and includes both the relatively subjective and the relatively objective as higher or transcendant realities, which alone are the proper objects of faith, the great postulates of reason in order to its own admission of its own being,—­the not distinguishing, I say, between these, and those positions which must be either matters of fact or fictions.  For such latter positions it is that miracles are required in lieu of experience.  A.’s testimony of experience supplies the want of the same experience for B. C. D., &c.  For example, how many thousands believe the existence of red snow on the testimony of Captain Parry!  But who can expect more than hints in a marginal note?

Sect.  VI. pp. 378, 9; 380, 1.

In the general views, then, which are presented in the writings of Swedenborg on the subject of Heaven and Hell, as the abodes, respectively, of happiness and of misery, while there certainly is not anything which is not in the highest degree agreeable both to reason and Scripture, there also seems nothing which could be deemed inconsistent with the usual conceptions of the Christian world.

What tends to render thinking readers a little sceptical, is the want of a distinct boundary between the deductions from reason, and the articles, the truth of which is to rest on the Baron’s personal testimony, his ‘visa et audita’.  Nor is the Baron himself (as it appears to me) quite consistent on this point.