keep God's commandments and love Him and His kingdom, and hell of those who love themselves and the world; (6) that the spiritual world—heaven and hell—holds the same relation to the natural world and its inhabitants as the soul to the body, being in and around the natural world and its life, and that after the death of the body the spirit continues to live in the spiritual world it had previously though unconsciously inhabited. Swedenborgians now constitute a widely spread and considerable society, with a regularly constituted ecclesiastical organization and a zealous missionary activity. Soon after Swedenborg's death students of his works in England and Sweden began to translate them from the Latin and to spread his views. First in time and activity amongst these early Swedenborgians was the Rev. John Clowes, rector of St John's, Manchester, who translated the whole of several treatises. The first public meeting of Swedenborgians, from which dates the foundation of the society, was held in London December 5, 1783, and was attended by five persons. The separation of the society from the “old church” as a religious body, with its distinct creed, worship, and ecclesiastical organization, took place May 7, 1787, and its first place of worship was in Great Eastcheap, London. The first general conference of the New Church was held April 17, 1789, in this chapel, when a series of resolutions concerning the creed, the sacraments, and ecclesiastical order of the society were adopted. At the same time churches began to be formed in various towns in England and in America. Towards the end of the century Swedenborg's doctrines obtained a considerable degree of acceptance on the Continent, separate societies having arisen here and there. Meantime the Manchester Printing Society, under Mr Clowes, printed and distributed Swedenborg's works in large numbers. In 1810 a London Printing Society was formed, which has been very active in the same way to the present time. In 1817 a convention of the American New Church was held in Philadelphia, which gave proof of the growth of the body in the United States. The same year the tenth general conference of the English section of the church was attended by twenty-seven delegates and ministers of various societies, and in 1821 there were upwards of fifty-two of these in Great Britain. At the general conference in 1885 it was reported that there were sixty-five societies or churches in Great Britain connected with the conference, having 5700 registered members, the net increase of the year being 119. The names of thirty-two ordained ministers appear in the report; the investments of the society amount to £60,453; and there are a dozen educational and missionary institutions in connexion with it. Some of the New Church day schools are amongst the largest and most efficient in the kingdom. From the same report it appears that the New Church has societies or institutions in most British colonies as well as in the principal countries of Europe. The report of the General Convention of the New Jerusalem in the United States, 1885, gives the names of 116 societies in America, with nearly the same number of ordinary ministers. In Italy, Sweden, and Prussia there is a Swedenborg mission sustained by help from England and America. In South Germany there exist congregations of the New Church, and the librarian of the university of Tübingen, Dr Immanuel Tafel, was exceedingly active until his death (1863) in the publication and translation of Swedenborg's works, and in the vindication of the doctrines of the New Church. In Austria, Norway, and Switzerland also there are congregations. But, in addition to full converts to Swedenborgianism, a considerable number of prominent theologians and other thinkers have been attracted by Swedenborg's works and parts of his system. While the extravagant anthropomorphism, the mechanical materialism, the theological narrowness, the wild allegorizing, the entire absence of historical knowledge, and the astounding prophetic claims of the man and his system,—in a word, the Gnosticism of Swedenborg and his followers,—must be offensive to philosophical minds, they can discover in his writings and the drift of his thought fine ethical views, profound glances of insight into the depths of the universe,—God, nature, man, and his destiny. The names of Oetinger, Herder, Goerres, Coleridge, Emerson, J. D. Morell may be given as proof of this. Such thinkers were attracted by one or more of the dominant and pervading principles or tendencies of his extraordinary mind. For he felt, if he did not adequately expound, the harmony of the universe, the fundamental unity of being and thought, of knowledge and will, of the divine and the human; and his wild system of allegory, with his equally wild communications with the unseen world, failed to conceal a deep moral and intellectual revolt against the most irrational forms of traditional orthodoxy, while his deep spiritual nature spurned the shallow intellectualism of the rationalists of the 18th century.
Literature.—A rich collection of materials for a life of Swedenborg is Documents concerning the Life and Character of Swedenborg, Collected, Translated, and Annotated, by Dr. R. L. Tafel, in 3 vols., Swedenborg Society, 1875-77. Of English lives the principal are—Emanuel Swedenborg, a Biography, by J. J. G. Wilkinson, London, 1849; Swedenborg, a Biography and an Exposition, by E. Paxton Hood, London, 1854; Swedenborg, his Life and Writings, by William White, 1866, rewritten in 1867 and in 1868; Emanuel Swedenborg, the Spiritual Columbus, a Sketch, by U. S. E., 2d ed., London, 1877. A useful handbook of Swedenborg's theology, consisting of extracts in English from his numerous works, to the Compendium of the Theological Writings of Emanuel Sicedenborg, by the Rev. Samuel Warren, London, 1885. Brief summaries of his system and writings are given in all the above biographies and in Edmund Swift's Manual of the Doctrines of the New Church, London, 1885. Important critiques from independent points of view are “Emanuel Swedenborg,” in the Prospective Review, May 1850; “The Mystic," in Emerson's Representative Men, 1850; Kant's Träume eines Geistersehers, 1706 (the best edition by Kehrbach, Leipsic, 1880); Herder's “Emanuel Swedenborg,” in his Adrastea (Werke zur Phil. und Gesch., vol. xii. pp. 110-125) ; Goerres's Emanuel Swedenborg, seine Visionen und sein Verhältniss zur Kirche, 1827; Dorner's Gesch. d. Prot. Theol., Munich, 1867, pp. 662-67. For the history of Swedenborgianism, see Rise and Progress of the New Jerusalem Church in England, America, and other Parts, by Robert Hindmarsh, edited by E. Madeley, London, 1861. The chief apologetic work is Noble's Appeal, 10th ed. 1881, London. See also National Review, April 1858. (J. F. S.)
SWEET POTATO. See Potato.
SWIFT, a bird so called from the extreme speed of its flight, which apparently exceeds that of any other British species, the Hirundo apus of Linnaeus and Cypselus apus or murarius of modern ornithologists, who have at last learned that it has only an outward resemblance but no near affinity to the Swallow (ante, p. 729) or its allies. Well known as a summer-visitor throughout the greater part of Europe, it is one of the latest to return from Africa, and its stay in the country of its birth is of the shortest, for it generally disappears from England very early in August, though occasionally to be seen for even two months later.
The Swift commonly chooses its nesting-place in holes under the eaves of buildings, but a crevice in the face of a quarry, or even a hollow tree, will serve it with the accommodation it requires. This indeed is not much, since every natural function, except sleep, oviposition, and incubation, is performed on the wing, and the easy evolutions of this bird in the air, where it remains for hours together, are the admiration of all who witness them. Though considerably larger than a Swallow, it can be recognized at a distance less by its size than by its peculiar shape. The head scarcely projects from the anterior outline of the pointed wings, which form an almost continuous curve, at right angles to which extend the body and tail, resembling the handle of the crescentic cutting-knife used in several trades, while the wings represent the blade. The mode of flight of the two birds is also unlike, that of the Swift being much more steady, and, rapid as it is, ordinarily free from jerks. The whole plumage, except a greyish-white patch under the chin, is a sooty black, but glossy above. Though its actual breeding-places are by no means numerous, its extraordinary speed and discursive habits make the Swift widely distributed; and throughout England scarcely a summer's day passes without its being seen in most places. A larger species, C. melba or C. alpinus, with the lower parts dusky white, which has its home in many of the mountainous parts of central and southern Europe, has several times been observed in Britain, and two examples of a species of a very distinct genus, Acanthyllis (or Chætura), which has its home in northern Asia, but regularly emigrates thence to Australia, have been obtained in England (Proc. Zool. Society, 1880, p. 1).[1]
Among other peculiarities the Swifts, as long ago described (probably from John Hunter's notes) by Home (Phil. Trans., 1817, pp. 332 et seqq., pl. xvi.), are remarkable for the development of their salivary glands, the secretions of which serve in most species to glue together the materials of which the nests are composed, and in the species of the genus Collocalia form almost the whole substance of the structure. These are the “edible” nests so eagerly sought by Chinese epicures as an ingredient for soup, and their composition, though announced many years since by Home (ut supra), whose statement was confirmed by Bernstein (Act. Soc. Sc. Indo-Néerlandicæ, iii. Art. 5, and Journ. für Ornithologie, 1859, pp. 111-119), has of late been needlessly doubted in favour of the popular belief that they were made of some kind of sea-weed, Algæ, or other vegetable matter collected by the birds.[2] It may be hoped that the examination and analysis made by Mr J. R. Green (Journal of Physiology, vi. pp. 40-45) have settled that question for all time. These remarkable nests consist essentially of mucus, secreted by the salivary glands above mentioned, which dries and looks like isinglass. Their marketable value depends on their colour and purity, for they are often intermixed with feathers and other foreign substances. The Swifts that construct these “edible” nests form a genus Collocalia, of which the number of species is uncertain; but they inhabit chiefly the islands of the Indian Ocean from the north of Madagascar eastward, as well as many of the tropical
- ↑ This species, A. caudacuta, has been generally, but Mr Hume says (Stray Feathers, ix. p. 230) wrongly, identified with the Hirundo ciris of Pallas. So many authors have recently ascribed the foundation of the genus Chætura to Stephens in the year 1825 that it may not be amiss to state that its origin dates only from 1826, the same year in which Boie established the commensurate genus Acanthyllis.
- ↑ Hence one species has been called Collocalia fuciphaga.
