Man, he insisted, had freedom of choice in spiritual things, or "salvation" would not be possible.10 That implied freedom to choose evil in preference to good. All the evil in the world was man-made, none of it from God.
Four, in literal translation, was: "Goods should be done because they are of God and from God."
And Five was: "These should be done by man as if by himself; but it should be believed that they are done by the Lord in man and through man."
Four and five were really the same. Swedenborg was confronted by the problem of "self—merit": how not to "take credit" for doing good, and thus become self-righteous, and yet leave man the amount of free choice that was necessary for salvation. He solved it quite logically by going back to the impersonal conception of God, as one might say. God was Good and Truth, but you could also say that Good and Truth were God. Therefore, naturally, if a man divided his last crust with another, or gave him the whole of it, God was acting through him. Man had in a sense done it himself, but he must never allow the "self" to boast about it, nor would he if he could continue to remember that all true good and all good truth were God.
There was, however, another point in article four. One might say that "humanitarians" had come up in the eighteenth century, people who from the noblest motives felt that "the good" was so good in itself it needed no "acknowledgment of the divine" to enforce it, a quite natural result of the spectacle that a power-loving church afforded. Swedenborg felt, due to his personal experience, that if the good were no longer regarded as "God," very soon it would be reduced to a level of utility. He had had a talk about that once, recorded in his diary, with an English bishop, whom he told that being good to one's neighbor for the sake of utility was Machiavellianism.11 And utility was also a word, like "sin," which could be stretched to cover a great many different things.
Swedenborg said, in effect, to orthodox Christians: By subjecting the understanding to "faith," you have destroyed true religion. He said to the atheist: By denying the divine, by putting the good
