It must be admitted that Swedenborg was frank in saying what he thought about the kind of clergymen he didn't like. Robsahm once asked him whether a certain pastor whose pathos and eloquence had always kept his church filled were not in a blessed state. "This man," was the answer, "went straight to hell among the societies of the hypocrites; for he was only spiritually minded while in the pulpit; at other times he was proud of his talents, and of the success he had in the world; he was an inflated man. No, no," he added, "there no dissimulation and no deceitful arts are of any avail . . ."
There is a story that a young man who seems to have regarded Swedenborg as a danger to Christian society approached him and asked what was the lot of his, the young man's, father in the other world. Swedenborg told him it was pitiable, "if your father belonged to that order of which very few are saved. Your father was a clergyman, was he not?" 9 This was true.
Since Swedenborg denied the vicarious atonement and the Trinity (as a trinity of persons) and generally insisted that religion was not something to save men from the consequences of their wickedness but something to prove to them that wickedness had inevitable consequences, and that hence the Lutheran theory of saving "faith" was wrong, it is hard to see how the pastors of the Lutheran state church of Sweden could look on him with a very friendly eye. Nor did they, although for a long while his good connections and favor at Court made them shut both their eyes when they looked in his direction. It was fairly easy so long as his books printed in Latin remained abroad, but when they were introduced little by little into Sweden, and when a Swedish clergyman, Dean Beyer of Gothenburg, began openly to say that Swedenborg was right, the ecclesiastical guns were unmasked.
Swedenborg was not surprised, he told Robsahm, when the latter asked him why only Beyer had accepted his explanation of Scripture. The clergy, he said, hear their doctrine of "faith alone" daily through schools and university, and then they cannot change. The clergy of every religion is like that, he added; they cannot be made to give up the most preposterous propositions after they have confirmed themselves in the doctrines.
The attack was led by Dean Ekebom of Gothenburg, who, in the
