Men take truths of this nature very fast. Yet
he abounds in assertions; he is a rich discoverer, and of things which
most import us to know. His thought dwells in essential resemblances,
like the resemblance of a house to the man who built it. He saw things
in their law, in likeness of function, not of structure. There is an
invariable method and order in his delivery of his truth, the habitual
proceeding of the mind from inmost to outmost. What earnestness and
weightiness,--his eye never roving, without one swell of vanity, or
one look to self, in any common form of literary pride! a theoretic
or speculative man, but whom no practical man in the universe could
affect to scorn. Plato is a gownsman; his garment, though of purple,
and almost skywoven, is an academic robe, and hinders action with its
voluminous folds. But this mystic is awful to Caesar. Lycurgus himself
would bow.
The moral insight of Swedenborg, the correction of popular errors, the
announcement of ethical laws, take him out of comparison with any other
modern writer, and entitle him to a place, vacant for some ages, among
the lawgivers of mankind.
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