NEW JERUSALEM CHURCH.
The New Jerusalem Church originated in the doctrines of the opened Word revealed to man kind in the writings of Emanuel Swedenborg.
(1) The Founder. Emanuel Swedenborg was thc son of a Swedish Lutheran Bishop, a scholar, a practical engineer, intrusted with a high official position, a member of the Swedish diet, a man of science, a philosopher, a theologian, and a seer, who lived between x688 and 1772. This life of over four-score years of untiring energy divides itself upon superficial observation into two peri ods. The first fifty years of it were devoted to the pursuit of natural learning and independent investigation in science and philosophy; the re maining years to an equally diligent discharge of the "holy office" to which he was called by the Lord Himself. With a thorough academic train ing, he began with the cultivation of the mathe matical and physical sciences, and shovved such ability in theoretical science, that he was entrusted with a position in the college of mines that gave him practical control of the development of the mineral wealth of Sweden. While in the faith ful discharge of his official affairs he was elabo rating in private and publishing from time to time the most sublime and extensive philosophical attempts upon which any single mind ever vent ured. Of his philosophical writings, beginning with the Principta, devoted to a complete natural philosophy of the elemental world. and continu ing with his works on the Animal Kingdont or the kingdom of the Anima, including a rational physiology as the basis of a rational psychology, it is not enough to say that lie anticipated by the application of his analytical and synthetic pro cesses, many of the results of subsequent experi mental discovery in every realm of science; it must rather be said that he announced philosoph ical doctrines, which are far more masterful in explaining the larger field of facts awaiting ex planation to-day, than thcy were appreciable to his own generation.
He was during this entire period thc precise type of man which this generation delights to honor; strong, keen, self-reliant, practical. En dowed with a hardy constitution, he had a calm, placid disposition; led an active, laborious, cheer ful life, traveling continually and keeping him self posted in the developments of science and contributing to its theoretical and practical achievements; cotnposing his works and conduct ing his literary business unaided; cnjoying the confidence of his king and fellow statesmen •, dis cussing politics in the senate and memorializing the government on finance and other weighty mat ters; while Ile was elaborating and publishing a system of universal philosophy, more complete and probably more enduring and controlling than any which bears the name of a human author, and to which the logic of events is compelling the attention of the learned after a century and a half of marvelous experimental research. Such was Swedenborg the assessor. A more penetrating and practical, and at the same time laborious and comprehensive man of thought never lived. .At the age of fifty-six, in the full maturity of his powers, he was called, as he declares, "to a holy office by the Lord, who most graciously man ifested himself to me in person, and opened my sikht to a view of the spiritual world, and granted me the privilege of conversing with spirits and angels." "From that day forth," lie says, "I gave up all worldly learning and labored only in spir itual things according to what the Lord com manded me to write." Rightly considered, his whole previous career appears to have been a preparation for this work. When he had run the whole circuit of the sciences, lie was introduced to a.new world of facts and laws by the opening of his spiritual senses, and thus to a spiritual sci ence and philosophy which could never have been discovered without these facts, and can never be understood apart from them.