“There they all are,” said Monsieur Becker, pointing to a second shelf on which were some sixty volumes.  “The treatises on which the Divine Spirit casts its most vivid gleams are seven in number, namely:  ‘Heaven and Hell’; ’Angelic Wisdom concerning the Divine Love and the Divine Wisdom’; ‘Angelic Wisdom concerning the Divine Providence’; ‘The Apocalypse Revealed’; ‘Conjugial Love and its Chaste Delights’; ‘The True Christian Religion’; and ’An Exposition of the Internal Sense.’  Swedenborg’s explanation of the Apocalypse begins with these words,” said Monsieur Becker, taking down and opening the volume nearest to him:  “’Herein I have written nothing of mine own; I speak as I am bidden by the Lord, who said, through the same angel, to John:  “Thou shalt not seal the sayings of this Prophecy."’ (Revelation xxii. 10.)

“My dear Monsieur Wilfrid,” said the old man, looking at his guest, “I often tremble in every limb as I read, during the long winter evenings the awe-inspiring works in which this man declares with perfect artlessness the wonders that are revealed to him.  ‘I have seen,’ he says, ’Heaven and the Angels.  The spiritual man sees his spiritual fellows far better than the terrestrial man sees the men of earth.  In describing the wonders of heaven and beneath the heavens I obey the Lord’s command.  Others have the right to believe me or not as they choose.  I cannot put them into the state in which God has put me; it is not in my power to enable them to converse with Angels, nor to work miracles within their understanding; they alone can be the instrument of their rise to angelic intercourse.  It is now twenty-eight years since I have lived in the Spiritual world with angels, and on earth with men; for it pleased God to open the eyes of my spirit as he did that of Paul, and of Daniel and Elisha.’

“And yet,” continued the pastor, thoughtfully, “certain persons have had visions of the spiritual world through the complete detachment which somnambulism produces between their external form and their inner being.  ‘In this state,’ says Swedenborg in his treatise on Angelic Wisdom (No. 257) ’Man may rise into the region of celestial light because, his corporeal senses being abolished, the influence of heaven acts without hindrance on his inner man.’  Many persons who do not doubt that Swedenborg received celestial revelations think that his writings are not all the result of divine inspiration.  Others insist on absolute adherence to him; while admitting his many obscurities, they believe that the imperfection of earthly language prevented the prophet from clearly revealing those spiritual visions whose clouds disperse to the eyes of those whom faith regenerates; for, to use the words of his greatest disciple, ’Flesh is but an external propagation.’  To poets and to writers his presentation of the marvellous is amazing; to Seers it is simply reality.  To some Christians his descriptions have seemed scandalous.  Certain critics have ridiculed the celestial substance