Only when Cicero comes by, our gentle seer sticks
a little at saying he talked with Cicero, and, with a touch of human
relenting, remarks, "one whom it was given me to believe was Cicero;"
and when the _soi disant_ Roman opens his mouth, Rome and eloquence
have ebbed away,--it is plain theologic Swedenborg, like the rest. His
heavens and hells are dull; fault of want of individualism. The
thousand-fold relation of men is not there. The interest that attaches
in nature to each man, because he is right by his wrong, and wrong by
his right, because he defies all dogmatizing and classification, so
many allowances, and contingencies, and futurities, are to be taken
into account, strong by his vices, often paralyzed by his
virtues,--sinks into entire sympathy with his society. This want reacts
to the center of the system. Though the agency of "the Lord" is in
every line referred to by name, it never becomes alive. There is no
lustre in that eye which gazes from the center, and which should vivify
the immense dependency of beings.
The vice of Swedenborg's mind is its theologic determination. Nothing
with him has the liberality of universal wisdom, but we are always in
a church.
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