voice will reverse the decision of the House. Here, the greatest possible amount of public inconvenience would arise; and it is notorious that the nation is entirely in harmony with its representatives.

No disinterested person pretends to say that the reformed House will support the Irish Church. Should Mr. Disraeli assert the contrary, he should be reminded of what took place in 1859, when Parliament was dissolved on his and Lord Derby's assurance that they could obtain a majority. They did not obtain a majority, but Mr.

Disraeli's two years of service were made up; and one of his last acts on quitting office was to grant a pension of 2,000l. a year to himself. He had once before, in 1851, misstated the probable result of an appeal to the country, and was similarly belied by the event. Let him beware of employing the same false pretence a third time, or rather let his colleagues beware, if they have the faculty of divining the opinion of their countrymen, or any lingering regard for public respect and confidence, which he unfortunately has not.

Whether it be

THE

:

HE curiosities of theology may, perhaps, be most effectively studied in the annals of the Syrian and African churches in the first three centuries of the Christian era. There is, indeed, a fair supply of topics for wonder in the history of every Christian denomination, nor are the sects of Islam without their samples of the liberty or license of speculation. Whether the student of such curiosities will be made the wiser by his inquiries, is for him to consider they may, however, make him a sadder man, and they will certainly afford him occasion for exercising such gifts of patience and charity as he may possess. In comparison with some of the usages or dogmas of those churches, the fancies of the schoolmen are sane, and the daily life ascribed to the Family of Love formerly, and to the Mormons of the present day, is decent and respectable. Taking into account every impelling or disturbing force attributable to climate, custom, or temperament, we yet fail in discovering what law of genesis or development presided over the Eastern or Southern professors of the Christian faith: and we may

possibly close our investigations with Sir Thomas Browne's opinion, expressed in his Urn Burial, that men have lost their reason in nothing so much as in their religion : and that since the religion of one seems madness unto another, to afford an account or rational of old rites requires no rigid reader.'

The subject of the Life we now proceed to notice, although differing in some respects from the histories of African or Syrian enthusiasts, presents a scarcely less singular phenomenon. In reading these volumes we have been sometimes inclined to suspect that initiation into certain mysteries, not, however, referred to in them, may be indispensable for a proper apprehension of the character and opinions of Emanuel Swedenborg. But, being of the profane, we find it difficult, if not impossible, to conceive of him, or to estimate him, in any terms not contradictory one of another. The churches or sects we have alluded to were not remarkable for the worldly wisdom or the scientific proficiency of their pastors or members. The Swedish Origen was by no means wanting

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in the wisdom of this world, while his attainments in science are beyond question. Nearly every Syrian or African enthusiast aspired to be the founder of a congregation, and it must be admitted, that his ambition was generally successful, nay, in some districts it would appear as if the shepherds were at least as numerous as the sheep. But Swedenborg, though he occasionally embraced a convert, did not, so far as we can discover, aspire to found a sect. Again, the leaders in religious movements, with a few signal and perhaps scandalous exceptions, practised or affected austerity of life, and imposed upon their followers strict and peculiar rules for their conduct in a profane world. But this cannot be said of the eponymus of the Swedenborgians. His habits of life were indeed frugal and simple, yet he imposed neither upon himself nor others any rule of life involving mortification of the flesh. In one respect indeed we find him in accordance with the saints of old. 'He never washed '-his face, indeed is specified but 'ex pede Herculem,' and we may fairly conjecture that such abstinence from water extended to all the members as well as the head. This observance he ascribed to an especial grace vouchsafed to him; the repugnance of dirt or even of dust for his person and garments.

Mr. White's life of Swedenborg we regard as a monument of unparalleled or even superhuman diligence. That a grateful pupil or a zealous disciple should refuse no labour in recording the virtues or defending the name of a beloved master is a pious duty and a labour of love. But the biographer of Emanuel Swedenborg is not himself a Swedenborgian! He is Hercules toiling without the bidding of Eurystheus a Marinus who has threaded the labyrinth of Plotinus without any philosophical attraction to the mundane or supra-mundane

doctrines of the teacher.' To have read, marked, and digested, as Mr. White has done, so many volumes, so many manuscripts, to have made abstracts of so many treatises on pure and applied mathematics, ethics, ontology, theology, to have followed his leader, extra flammantia moenia mundi,' through realms of dream, vision, and spiritual colloquy, to have, like Dante, without indeed an accompanying Virgil, ascended to the heights and gone down to the depths, to have compiled a Cyclopædia Swedenborgiana, is a feat rivalling the labours of a Benedictine monk. It is popularly believed that the chapters and verses of the Koran were originally inscribed on palm-leaves and the shoulder-bones of mutton. But a holocaust of sheep or a forest of palm-trees would be required for the sayings and the writings of Swedenborg. Nor is their number the only cause of toil to the biographer. Ignorant of or indifferent to the art of composition, their author is diffuse, unconnected and tedious, at least to unbelievers, beyond the tediousness of kings. He repeats himself unscrupulously, not merely in different books but in the same book. For the few gems that glitter in his pages-and some of these are of unquestionable brilliance-his readers have to wander over a dreary desert of sand-hills : the thread of his verbosity is out of all proportion to the staple of his argument, and even his visions are sometimes easier to apprehend than either his physical or ethical theories.

Every biography of Emanuel Swedenborg is necessarily bi-partite. As an ordinary man and a Christian' his length of days passed with few remarkable events; the incidents begin when he became, long after middle age, a seer and expounder of mysteries. Some strange stories are indeed told of him in boyhood; but he came of a stock predisposed to see visions and to

receive or imagine preternatural communications; and the dreams of his immature years were chastened or suspended by the severer studies of chemistry, anatomy, mathematics, metaphysics, and mineralogy. We may admire the universality of his pursuits; yet Leibnitz, who was his contemporary, was equally versatile, and in one respect more so, for Swedenborg never aspired to blend the labours of the mathematician with those of the antiquary and historian. Neither within the realms of science and psychology is there is anything beyond his diligence and proficiency to distinguish Swedenborg from the general mass of severe students; nay, there is much in his life that shows him to have been endowed with good common sense and a reasonable perception of his own interests. He was a very tolerable courtier; he did not disregard worldly honours; he could speak to the purpose in Parliament; his counsel on finance and in the ordnance department was sought by kings and ministers. But this is the material and mundane side of his character; it is the other, the spiritual side, from which he derives his fame and excites curiosity. The sage grave student, the practical engineer and assessor of mines, is also a dreaming Jacob, a Daniel on the banks of the Ulai, a John in Patmos. On the one side he is of the earth, earthy; on the other of the heavens, heavenly-at least, in his own belief and in that of his disciples. Some acquaintance and some dealings he held with the princes and prelates of this world; but his connection with such exalted personages in the flesh is as nothing in comparison with his intimacy with them in the spirit. His biographer admits that Swedenborg, although an amiable and accessible person, had but few friends and acquaintances in the common acceptation of the terms. He was neither

morose nor ascetic, but he was not social. It was after his associates had shuffled off their mortal coil that his real intimacies with them began. Even with the sovereigns of his own country he seems to have become more familiar after they had ceased to reign on earth; and we may ob serve in passing, that Emanuel was a most loyally affected person, assigning, with rare exceptions, to the wearers of earthly crowns at least heavenly coronets in the world beyond the grave. But, although he was a bishop's son, he does not extend such privileges liberally to departed fathers-in-God; conceiving, possibly, that they had already enjoyed or abused their share of good things. He is indeed, in trance or vision, far better acquainted with the saints and prophets of the Old and New Covenant than with their successors, alive or defunct. Not that intercourse with the holy men of old implied, in Swedenborg's case, approval of their conduct or acquiescence in their opinions. At times we find him not on speaking terms with St. Paul, and, in our judgment at least, unreasonably harsh to David. Beyond the composition of some Latin verses in his youth, Swedenborg made no pretensions to poetry, and none at all to music: we cannot therefore attribute this prejudice against the great lyrist of Israel to professional jealousy. By some such economy as weighed with the compilers of the Book of Common Prayer, when they clubbed together in one collect St. Simon and St. Jude, two souls were apparently allotted to Swedenborg's body. They contrived to dwell together in harmony, and their owner appears to have been well satisfied with them both-with the soul of the assessor of mines, and with the soul of the seer of visions. It is from his writings alone that we discover their diversity. There, indeed, to profane persons like ourselves—

Corpore in uno Frigida pugnabant calidis, humentia siccis, Mollia cum duris, sine pondere habentia pondus.

Following this twofold division, which is also in some measure that of his biographer also, we shall now attempt to represent, so far as our limits permit, the double career of Swedenborg. We prefix to the sketch some account of his grandfather and father, since from each of these he seems to have derived some qualities as well as some peculiarities. In this particular, as in so many others, Mr. White is much more satisfactory than his predecessors; even Dr. Wilkinson, the first to present to English readers a connected biography of Swedenborg, has passed too briefly over the father of Emanuel, certainly not the least remarkable of bishops.

6

Daniel Isaksson, the grandfather of Swedenborg, and his wife Anna were pious, industrious, and poor people, who brought up a flock of children in a godly, severe, and serious manner.' They were the representatives in Sweden of innumerable households in Scotland, such as Burns has immortalised in his 'Cotter's Saturday Night,' and to which Scotland owes so much of its moral and political strength of character. To Daniel and Anna Isaksson the Bible was what the books of the law were to the Jews and the Koran to Mohammedans : it prescribed even minutest actions; it was the touchstone of every thought; it was the milk and it was the meat of the youth and the elders of the family. My mother,' wrote her son Jesper, was all to me that Monica was to Augustine.' The Isaksson household, had it been known to Goldsmith, would have been commemorated in his 'Deserted Village;' had it been known to Crabbe, it would have furnished him with one more subject for his severe pencil.

Daniel Isaksson would have been impenetrably deaf to the late Professor Malthus and Mr. John Mill, charmed they never so wisely;' for he accounted a numerous family as the source of all his blessings. He held the widow of Sarepta's faith in the infinite divisibility of the oil and the meal. After dining, he would sometimes say, "Thank you, my children, for dinner! I have dined with you, and not you with me. God has given me food for your sake." His trust, accompanied by prudence and sagacity. was in the end crowned with plenty. He formed one of a party of twenty-four to open a deserted copper-mine flooded with water, and by its yield he became one of the richest miners in his district.' We shall have occasion, presently, to remark upon the general character of the Swedish clergy in the time of Swedenborg: the example of the Isaksson family inclines us to believe that the flock was often worthy of better shepherds than those it obeyed, if, indeed, it needed any shepherds at all. The dalesmen of Sweden, indeed, realised the pictures which the Latin poets have drawn of Sabine simplicity contrasted with the corrupt and fevered life of Rome; and had there been a Scandinavian Horace, he might have justly taken up the burden of the old song, and celebrated again the

rusticorum mascula militum
Proles, Sabellis docta ligonibus
Versare glebas, et severæ

Matris ad arbitrium recisos
Portare fustes.

It was a received, but we should think for the Heralds' College at Stockholm an inconvenient, usage,

not yet extinct,' for sons to take a different name from that of their sires, and Jesper, one of the many children of Daniel Isaksson, was called, not Isaksson, but Svedberg, after the homestead of Sveden which his parents owned. Landed