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The Word from Alpha to Omega is one. Only the interpretation varies as gradually given with man's developing capacity to receive. The ages for infantile reception, for childhood instruction and obedience, for blind reliance on priests and their dogmas, had passed. The new light now needed must explain the will of God and His providence for man in a rational, intelligible way, not as a substitute for faith, but as her handmaid, for her ultimate support. It must be addressed to the understanding and must therefore come, not with authority to compel, but with light leading into all truth, in accordance with our Lord's promise. The mind to receive this new light in fulness must be trained in the learning and reason of the world, and the heart must be open to the Spirit. Where was it to be found?

1 ssss1 Philosophy of History, p. 120.

2 ssss1 Ib. p, 250.

3 ssss1 Dr. J. S. Dörner: Hist. Prot. Theology, ii, 213.

4 ssss1 Ib. ii, 274, 296.

5 ssss1 Palmer: The Church of Christ, i, 348.

6 ssss1 English Church in Eighteenth Century, ii, 44.

7 ssss1 Abbey and Overton: op. cit. ii, 44.

8 ssss1 Life of Frederick the Great, i, 11.

9 ssss1 Op. cit. ii, 268.

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II

EMANUEL SWEDENBORG: PARENTAGE AND EARLY LIFE

In the middle of the seventeenth century was living an honest, God-fearing, and prosperous miner named Daniel Isaksson, with his wife Anna, daughter of a Swedish pastor, on his homestead called Sweden, a hundred and twenty miles northwest from Stockholm. Grateful for the large family Heaven sent them, Daniel would often say at dinner, "Thank you, my children, for this meal, for I have dined with you and not you with me: God has given me food for your sakes." His second son Jesper, born in 1653, took the name Swedberg from the homestead. Later, when for his services to church and state his family was ennobled, Jesper's children received the name Swedenborg, though the father himself retained the name Swedberg. Inheriting his father's piety, on being rescued in boyhood from imminent death—caught under a mill-wheel—he resolved never to forget either morning or evening to commit ​himself to God's keeping and to the protection of His holy angels.