C.D. Warner, et al., comp. The Library of the World’s Best Literature.
An Anthology in Thirty Volumes. 1917.

The Second Coming of the Lord

By Emanuel Swedenborg (1688–1772)

SINCE the Lord cannot manifest himself in person, as has been shown just above, and yet he has foretold that he would come and establish a New Church, which is the New Jerusalem,—it follows that he is to do it by means of a man who is able not only to receive the doctrines of this church with his understanding, but also to publish them by the press. That the Lord has manifested himself before me, his servant, and sent me on this office, and that after this he opened the sight of my spirit, and thus let me into the spiritual world, and gave me to see the heavens and the hells, and also to speak with angels and spirits, and this now continually for many years, I testify in truth; and also that from the first day of that call I have not received anything that pertains to the doctrines of that church from any angel, but from the Lord alone while I read the Word.

To the end that the Lord might be constantly present, he has disclosed to me that the spiritual sense of his Word, in which divine truth is in its light, and in this he is constantly present; for his presence in the Word is only by means of the spiritual sense: through the light of this he passes into the shade in which the sense of the letter is; comparatively as it happens with the light of the sun in the daytime by the interposition of a cloud. That the sense of the letter of the Word is as a cloud, and the spiritual sense glory, and the Lord himself the sun from which the light proceeds, and that thus the Lord is the Word, has been demonstrated above.

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