New Jerusalem

Painful and blasphemous as the suggestion would have been to 125 pious folk meeting in Detroit last week, the fact remains that in most U. S. minds Emanuel Swedenborg and his doctrines are sadly confused with advice to the married, physical culture, Rosicrucianism and patent can-openers. That is because most citizens have met the great Scandinavian savant only as a tiny picture in the back pages of popular magazines, tucked away in one-inch advertisements offering HEAVEN AND HELL, "632 page book treating of the Life after Death," for 5-c-.

In 1910 the U. S. Patent Office refused an application for a stove patent because Emanuel Swedenborg had invented an identical stove 200 years before. The unlucky stove-inventor was one of a myriad of scientists & inventors anticipated by this versatile 18th Century Swede. When his 60-odd scientific books & pamphlets were finally collected and examined toward the end of the 19th Century it was discovered that Swedenborg had been ahead of his time in almost every field of science. He invented an ear-trumpet and mercury air pump, sketched a submarine, airplane, machine gun, fire extinguisher, steam engine. He propounded the nebular hypothesis before Kant and LaPlace, anticipated all Scandinavian geologists in his studies of paleontology, was first to explain the phenomenon of phosphorescence, beat modern physicists by 150 years with his molecular magnetic theory and modern physiologists with his discoveries concerning the nature and activity of the brain, spinal cord and ductless glands.

Winning royal gratitude for his work as Assessor-Extraordinary of Sweden's Royal Board of Mines and for his invention of a device for transporting ships overland, he was ennobled in 1719. In Sweden's Parliament he pioneered in fiscal reforms and liquor regulation. He knew nine languages, was an accomplished organist and Latin versifier, mastered three crafts and dabbled in four others. Finally in 1744, aged 57, he began talking with angels and spirits.

Son of a Lutheran bishop, Emanuel Swedenborg spent his time between the ages of four and ten in "thought upon God, salvation and the spiritual experience of men." Some of his precocious revelations made his father & mother conclude that angels were speaking through him, decide to put a stop to "these celestial excursions." But at 57 his anatomical search for man's soul turned Swedenborg once more to supernatural intercourse. This time he had no doubt that the angels and spirits were real. They scattered sweet or disagreeable odors on his body, produced pain, heat, cold. One night some evil spirits got into his scalp, fled at dawn "with a slight hissing sound, like when some little distended vesicle is perforated." For the next 27 years Swedenborg made almost daily excursions through Heaven and Hell, heard the meaning of the Scriptures expounded by angels, spirits and the Lord Himself. All that he saw & heard he dutifully set down in 29 fat Latin volumes.

Christ, he firmly believed, had chosen Emanuel Swedenborg as the vehicle of His second coming. But for all his complex system of theology, he did not attempt to preach or found a sect. His New Church was to embrace all Christendom, revitalized by his revelations. It remained for one Robert Hindmarsh and other devotees to establish the Church of the New Jerusalem.

The New Jerusalem now counts its population at 17,000, scattered through every sizable country in the world except China. The U. S. shelters 7,000 Swedenborgians with 100 churches. Because outsiders were inclined to confuse it with Judaism, members now refer to their organization simply as the New Church. The New Church patterns its services on the Episcopalian, its administrative set-up on the Congregational. In 1890 some members, deciding that Emanuel Swedenborg's revelations of the Scriptures' hidden meanings had hidden meanings all their own, began to incorporate his writings in their services. Result: a schism, creating the General Church of the New Jerusalem which now has 2,500 members and the No. 1 Swedenborgian academy at Bryn Athyn, Pa.

Except for a cautious approach to birth control, last week's 114th General Convention of the New Church in Detroit stuck strictly to routine business. A few delegates lamented the Church's failure to proselytize the 40,000 persons who last year bought 5-c- copies of Heaven and Hell from its loosely affiliated Swedenborg Foundation in Manhattan.

Queen Victoria's mother belonged to the New Church, as does Mrs. Frank A. Vanderlip. present at the Detroit convention. Publishers Clarence Barren of the Wall Street Journal and John Bigelow of the New York Evening Post were members. Contemplation in a New Church church in London inspired Poet William Blake to write his "Songs of Innocence." In formal or spiritual fellowship Swedenborgians also claim Goethe, Wagner, Berlioz, Balzac, Coleridge, Tennyson, Browning, Carlyle, Emerson, Thoreau, Victor Hugo, Henry James, Andrew Carnegie, Maeterlinck, Yeats, Helen Keller, Elbert Hubbard, Amelita Galli-Curci and Eddie Guest.

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