from the wrath of the Lamb!’ The Lamb is the great figure and hope of the Angels misjudged and persecuted here below.  Christ himself has said, ’Blessed are those who mourn!  Blessed are the simple-hearted!  Blessed are they that love!’—­All Swedenborg is there!  Suffer, Believe, Love.  To love truly must we not suffer? must we not believe?  Love begets Strength, Strength bestows Wisdom, thence Intelligence; for Strength and Wisdom demand Will.  To be intelligent, is not that to Know, to Wish, and to Will,—­the three attributes of the Angelic Spirit?  ‘If the universe has a meaning,’ Monsieur Saint-Martin said to me when I met him during a journey which he made in Sweden, ‘surely this is the one most worthy of God.’

“But, Monsieur,” continued the pastor after a thoughtful pause, “of what avail to you are these shreds of thoughts taken here and there from the vast extent of a work of which no true idea can be given except by comparing it to a river of light, to billows of flame?  When a man plunges into it he is carried away as by an awful current.  Dante’s poem seems but a speck to the reader submerged in the almost Biblical verses with which Swedenborg renders palpable the Celestial Worlds, as Beethoven built his palaces of harmony with thousands of notes, as architects have reared cathedrals with millions of stones.  We roll in soundless depths, where our minds will not always sustain us.  Ah, surely a great and powerful intellect is needed to bring us back, safe and sound, to our own social beliefs.

“Swedenborg,” resumed the pastor, “was particularly attached to the Baron de Seraphitz, whose name, according to an old Swedish custom, had taken from time immemorial the Latin termination of ‘us.’  The baron was an ardent disciple of the Swedish prophet, who had opened the eyes of his Inner-Man and brought him to a life in conformity with the decrees from On-High.  He sought for an Angelic Spirit among women; Swedenborg found her for him in a vision.  His bride was the daughter of a London shoemaker, in whom, said Swedenborg, the life of Heaven shone, she having passed through all anterior trials.  After the death, that is, the transformation of the prophet, the baron came to Jarvis to accomplish his celestial nuptials with the observances of Prayer.  As for me, who am not a Seer, I have only known the terrestrial works of this couple.  Their lives were those of saints whose virtues are the glory of the Roman Church.  They ameliorated the condition of our people; they supplied them all with means in return for work,—­little, perhaps, but enough for all their wants.  Those who lived with them in constant intercourse never saw them show a sign of anger or impatience; they were constantly beneficent and gentle, full of courtesy and loving-kindness; their marriage was the harmony of two souls indissolubly united.  Two eiders winging the same flight, the sound in the echo, the thought in the word,—­these, perhaps, are true images of their union.  Every