Part 7

As the orthodox doctrine of the Trinity was false, argued Swedenborg, and there were no three Persons, as supposed, it was, of course, impossible for one of them, the Son, to offer Himself as sacrifice to appease the wrath of another, the Father. The doctrine of the atonement, therefore, as taught by the Church, had no basis in fact. God needed no reconciliation to His creatures. It was they who needed to be reconciled to Him before they could be fitted to appear in His presence. Christ took upon Himself human nature that He might conquer mankind’s spiritual enemies which were keeping him in bondage and estranged from his Divine Source.

One of Swedenborg’s most astounding statements had reference to the Last Judgment. This was not, maintained Swedenborg, as the orthodox generally hold, the final consummation of all things. The event was an occurrence in the spiritual sphere which actually took place in the year 1757! It appears from this amazing account that in the Intermediate State so many undesirable and evil spiritual entities had accumulated that they were threatening the whole world with imminent catastrophe. It may be remembered, in this connection, that in Swedenborg’s time scepticism was everywhere rampant, and that religious life had reached its lowest ebb. This was the case not only on the Continent, but pre-eminently in England, where the movement headed by John Wesley led to such remarkable scenes in connection with the great spiritual revival which followed this period of religious apathy. To avert the catastrophe threatened to the world according to Swedenborg’s theory, a general judgment was executed upon the spirits who were in revolt and were imperilling the divine order. These powers of evil were at that date placed under restraint, so that an influx of new spiritual forces among men might be made possible. Swedenborg actually goes so far as to affirm that he himself was permitted to witness this judgment in fulfilment of the prophecies made in the Gospels and in the Book of Revelation.

The Swedenborgian teaching which has come in probably for most criticism is that with regard to Marriage. Swedenborg (thus far as it appears to me quite rightly) insisted that sex is a spiritual as well as a physical distinction. He denied the virtues of celibacy and declared that true chastity resides in the perfect marriage relation. Marriage, according to Swedenborg, is not a physical relationship till death part the united pair, but is eternal in its character. “Conjugial love” being the central and fundamental love of man’s life is also the source of his fullest joy. The delights of the true conjugial love exceed the delights of all other loves. All delights that are felt by man proceed from love, and it follows, therefore, that the principal happiness in the celestial life must have a similar source, and the highest joy of heaven must therefore be the spiritual counterpart of the conjugial life of earth. It does not, of course, necessarily follow from this that earthly marriages are perpetuated in heaven. If the feelings of the marriage partners towards one another are concordant and sympathetic, they continue indeed their married life; but if they are discordant and antipathetic, they dissolve it. For true conjugial love is the only possible form of marriage in heaven, and “as their love lasts to eternity, it follows that the wife becomes more and more a wife and the husband more and more a husband. The true reason of this is that in a marriage of truly conjugial love each married partner becomes continually a more interior man. For that love opens the interiors of their minds and in the proportion in which these are opened the man becomes more and more a man.”

Swedenborg has some very beautiful observations with regard to the rejuvenescence of those who have passed into the higher life. “All who come into heaven,” he says, “return into their vernal youth, and remain so to eternity. The more thousands of years they live the more beautiful and happy is the spring to which they attain.... In a word, to grow old in heaven is to grow young.... They who live in the chaste life of marriage are above all others in the order and form of Heaven after death. Their beauty, therefore, is surpassing, and the flower of their youth endures for ever.”

What are we to say of this man who propounded this amazing gospel as a direct message from the highest spheres? What are we to say of his communications and conversations with the unseen world? Of his bona fides it is impossible to entertain a doubt. The ordinary hypothesis is that he suffered from hallucinations. It has been argued on the other hand, that for a man so sane and so shrewd in the ordinary affairs of the world, hallucinations of the kind were an impossibility. This, however, seems going rather too far. Some of the sanest men in the world have had special points on which they were not mentally sound. Monomania is a recognised form of mental aberration, and the man who suffers from it is as sane as his fellows on all matters except one.

This spiritual communion, however, was continuous in the case of Swedenborg for many years, and during those years occupied either in itself or in the activities that arose from it the larger portion of his life. In spite of this absorption, his relations with his fellow men continued as sane and responsible as those of any of his neighbours. Would this have been possible, one may ask, in the face of so absorbing an interest, had this interest merely been founded on a monomania? It would, I think, be difficult to parallel such a case. If, however, we decide to take Swedenborg’s relations with the other world at his own valuation, are we called upon to accept his gospel at his own valuation on that account? Certainly I think not. Swedenborg’s estimate of the status of the spiritual beings with whom he communicated, even if we accept their reality, need not be ours. Recent investigations and records of innumerable psychic experiences have tended to show what a miscellaneous crowd of spirits hover around the confines of this material world. Swedenborg’s mistake has been made by many spiritualists of the present day, and sometimes with disastrous results. Swedenborg had not before him the evidence which we now hold to warn him of the necessity of testing the quality of his spiritual communicants. The experiences encountered overwhelmed him by their unexpected and apparently miraculous character, and his naturally sane judgment was at fault for want of a criterion by which to estimate them. Few of those who now accept the genuineness of psychical phenomena are prepared to question Swedenborg’s exceptional mediumistic powers. To allow them to their fullest extent is by no means to accept the doctrine which was preached through his mediumship.

Of Swedenborg’s psychic gifts there is indeed plenty of evidence quite outside the teachings of his celestial visitors. On one occasion he disclosed to the Queen of Sweden a secret that had existed between her and her deceased brother, the Crown Prince Augustus William of Prussia, which was unknown to any living person. On another he described to a whole company of people at Gothenburg a destructive fire which had broken out at that very moment in Stockholm. Again on another occasion he revealed to the widow of Monsieur de Marteville the hiding place of a missing receipt for money which had been paid by her husband, the Dutch Ambassador at Stockholm. These incidents are among the best authenticated of any extant historical records of a psychic character. The philosopher Kant, among others, made a searching investigation into the evidence on which they rested, and came away absolutely convinced of their truth. It is curious to note that John Wesley was not a little interested in the Swedenborgian propagandism. The great Methodist preacher was impressed with a strong desire to meet the Swedish seer—a desire to which, however, he had never given open expression. The Rev. Samuel Smith, one of Wesley’s preachers, records how, about the end of February 1772 he was in attendance upon John Wesley, when the latter received a communication as follows from Swedenborg, who was then in London, which he read aloud.

GREAT BATH STREET, GREAT BATH FIELDS.

SIR,—I have been informed in the world of spirits that you have a strong desire to converse with me. I shall be happy to see you if you will favour me with a visit. I am, sir, your humble servant,

EMANUEL SWEDENBORG.

Mr Wesley wrote in reply that he was then on the point of starting for a six months’ journey, but would be pleased to wait on Swedenborg after his return to London. Swedenborg replied to this, that the visit proposed by Wesley would be too late, as he, Swedenborg, would enter the world of spirits on the 29th day of the next month, never more to return, a prediction which proved perfectly correct.

Other men have written many books. It is Swedenborg’s unique distinction, if distinction it is, to be the one man in history who has written a library on his own account. The encyclopædic brain does not, as a rule, tend to perspicuity in style, and Swedenborg has suffered from neglect owing to the fact that the fertility of his genius was not sufficiently associated with the powers of selection and condensation. To search for the treasures of his knowledge among his published works is like looking, in the words of the hackneyed proverb, “for needles in a haystack.” Had he given us far less in volume the world would doubtless have profited more by the very valuable information contained in his writings.

There are times when one is inclined to regret (if also to feel thankfulness) that Swedenborg was side-tracked by his Celestials and that he did not complete his phenomenal career on the lines which he had marked out for himself. It is a vain, though a most alluring speculation, to consider how the destinies of nations might have evolved if certain incidents in a single life history had eventuated otherwise than they did. We may conceive of Swedenborg bringing to completion his schemes for the construction of flying machines and submarines, nearly two centuries earlier than was decreed by destiny, and ask ourselves, if we will, what use the great Napoleon might not have made of these formidable implements of destructive warfare, and how far the map of Europe, and indeed of the world, might have been changed through their employment by his formidable genius; or, again, to what extent the linking up of the New and Old Worlds might have been accelerated by such developments. Here at least we must admit was a phenomenon—a man who realised, in a measure undreamed of by his contemporaries, not only in the physical but also in the spiritual sphere, the stupendous possibilities of the Coming Time.

Footnote 10:

Church property being free from taxation.

Footnote 11:

See Life of Emanuel Swedenborg. By George Trobridge. London: Frederick Warne & Co. To which book I must acknowledge my great indebtedness.

Footnote 12:

There are not a few of the communications recorded, notably in the “Spiritual Diary,” which might be advanced to support the hypothesis of a disordered brain; and we must not lose sight of the fact that Swedenborg’s tireless activities taxed his intellectual faculties beyond the powers of any but the most exceptional human organism.

VI COUNT CAGLIOSTRO

Who has not heard of Cagliostro? And yet who but a few students have any real knowledge of that mysterious character, of whom it may be said, as it was of Melchizedek, that he had “neither beginning of life nor end of days.” Both, at least, like the king of Salem’s, are wrapped in uncertainty, and though popular tradition, repeated again and again by the uncritical historian, has identified Cagliostro’s early life with that of the Italian scoundrel Joseph Balsamo, the evidence is as near conclusive as presumptive evidence can well be, that the two had no connection whatever with one another, beyond having married Italian wives with the same surname—and that by no means an uncommon one—and the fact that Balsamo is said to have had an uncle of the name of Cagliostro. From what we know of Balsamo it may fairly be said that two people more opposite in character than himself and Count Cagliostro would be difficult to discover, and the identification of the two would seem to involve the assumption that Cagliostro had discarded his first wife and taken a second, a supposition which would render worthless the argument based on the identity of their surnames.

Cagliostro’s whole career, as far as we know it, shows a character in which generosity is perpetually being carried to the verge of folly. His credulity was constantly making him the dupe of designing knaves, in whose honesty he placed a pathetic faith, and had he ever had the misfortune to encounter his alter ego, a common rogue of the most ordinary type, it is safe to predict that he would not have escaped from his clutches till he had been fleeced of the bulk of his possessions. As late as the date of his trial in the affair of the Diamond Necklace, no suggestion of the identity of the two characters was even mooted. The story owes its origin to the fertile brain of one of the greatest scoundrels of whom European history holds record, the notorious blackmailer, Theveneau de Morande.

A short résumé of this arch-villain’s history will probably be sufficient to dissipate any credence which has ever been placed in a narrative for which his assertions are our only authority. Theveneau de Morande was born in 1741, the son of a lawyer, at Arnay-le-Duc, in Burgundy. As a boy he was arrested for theft in a house of ill-fame. Subsequently he enlisted, obtained his discharge through his father’s intervention, found himself once more in prison at For-l’Evêque, and was then confined in a convent at Armentières, from which he was released two years after at the age of four-and-twenty. Having shortly after lampooned one of the members of the government, he was compelled to fly the country and took refuge in England, where he arrived in a state of destitution.

Needs must when the devil drives, and, the pinch of poverty sharpening his wits, he now turned his attention to the black-mailing business, in the pursuit of which he was soon to evince a quite uncommon aptitude and adroitness. His talents in this direction were ably seconded by a facile pen and a command of vituperative language and personal abuse which the author of the Letters of Junius could scarcely have outdone. His first effort of importance in this direction was Le Gazetier Cuirassé, ou Anecdotes Scandaleuses sur la Cour de France. Those who would not purchase immunity by a lump sum down had their characters and private lives mercilessly torn to pieces in its pages. The book is said to have brought him £1000. An attempt to blackmail Voltaire was less successful. The veteran philosophe published the blackmailer’s letter with comments by his own satiric pen. The blackmailer’s path has indeed its ups and downs, and once he was fain to accept a horsewhipping and publish an abject apology, the price extorted by an offended French nobleman. Madame du Barry, however, Louis XV.’s notorious favourite, was made of other stuff, and in consequence the Memoires d’une Femme Publique, compared with which Le Gazetier Cuirassé was said to have been “rosewater,” were never published. Morande accepted the sum of 32,000 livres in solatium for his wounded literary amour propre. Before, however, paying him his price the French Government had attempted to kidnap the audacious libeller. This was the ancient substitute for the more prosaic extradition methods of modern times. The plot, however, failed. With a dexterity worthy of a better cause, Morande, warned in time, was able to pose in the English press as a political exile and avenger of public morality. The sympathy of the susceptible public responded warmly to the unscrupulous appeal, and the representatives of French authority escaped with difficulty from the clutches of an infuriated London mob.

It not unfrequently happens with countries that have been at war, that the signature of the treaty of peace is followed after no long lapse of time by a formal alliance between the erstwhile foes, there being obviously two methods of gaining one’s ends, the method of grab and the method of give and take, and the failure of one suggesting the advisability of adopting the other. So at least reasoned the French Government, and the payment of Morande’s price was followed in due course by his employment on behalf of the said Government in the capacity of subsidised journalist, and spy. Morande was nothing loth to come to terms, and eventually blossomed out into the Editor of the Courier de l’Europe. This journal, originally started by Latour under the ægis of the French Government, was soon read in every corner of the Continent. This was the weapon which of all others the blackmailer desired for his purposes. “In it,” says Brisset, “he tore to pieces the most estimable people, and manufactured, or caused to be manufactured, articles to ruin any one whom he feared.”

Cagliostro had—all unwittingly—made dire enemies of the French Court through his acquittal in the trial over the Diamond Necklace affair. To acquit Cagliostro, who had no more to do with the matter in question than the man in the moon, appeared from the royal standpoint to be tantamount to incriminating the Queen, on whom, in fact, suspicion long and not unnaturally rested. Morande, therefore, received his instructions from Paris to ruin Cagliostro’s reputation. The means ready to his hand was the Courier de l’Europe. Hence the story of Joseph Balsamo and his identification with the soi-disant Count Cagliostro. To say that the authority hardly seems adequate is surely to put it mildly. And yet Carlyle, and others before and after him, have quietly accepted the statement of the paid blackmailer as sufficient evidence of the character and history of his victim!

Who, then, was Cagliostro? The answer to this question must ever remain among the unsolved problems of history. There is, however, no reason to dismiss as incredible—even if there is reason to doubt—the account which he gave of himself on the occasion of the “Diamond Necklace” trial. From what we know of Cagliostro we may, I think, say that his character was far too ingenuous for him to have been likely to invent so remarkable a tale. Everything, however, in his history points to the fact that he was just the person to take a record of the kind and colour it with the hues of his own fertile imagination. In any case, the impartial historian, while dismissing as preposterous the Balsamo fiction is bound to give some weight—however slight—to the only evidence on the subject we possess which is not manifestly untrue. Cagliostro, however, himself did not pretend to have knowledge of his parentage. “I cannot,” he states, “speak positively as to the place of my nativity, nor as to the parents who gave me birth. All my inquiries have ended only in giving me some great notions, it is true, but altogether vague and uncertain, concerning my family.” The gist, however, of his story was that he spent his childhood in Arabia, where he was brought up under the name of Acherat. He had then, he states, four persons attached to his service—the chief of whom was a certain Althotas, a man between fifty-five and sixty years of age. This man (whom it has been attempted to identify with a certain Kölmer, a Jutland merchant, who had travelled extensively and had the reputation of being a master-magician) informed Cagliostro that he had been left an orphan when three months old, and that his parents were Christian and nobly born. All his attempts, however, to discover the secret of his birth were doomed to disappointment. The matter was one which was treated as taboo. In his twelfth year (to follow his own story) he left Medina for Mecca, where he remained three years, until, wearying of the monotonous round of the Cherif’s Court, he obtained leave to travel.

One day (he narrates), when I was alone, the prince entered my apartment; he strained me to his bosom with more than usual tenderness, bid me never cease to adore the Almighty, and added, bedewing my cheeks with his tears: “Nature’s unfortunate child, adieu!”