At the end of our conversation a question escapes my lips like an arrow which flies sky-wards, "Do you know Swedenborg?"
"No; but my mother has his works, and has found wonderful things in them."
From atheism to Swedenborg is only a step!
I beg him to lend me Swedenborg's works, and my friend, that Saul among the young prophets, brings me the _Arcana Cœlestia_. Moreover, he introduces a young man to me who has been highly gifted by the powers. The latter relates to me events in his life which only too closely resemble my own. When we compare our trials, we find a new light thrown upon them, and we gain deliverance by the help of Swedenborg. I thank Providence which has sent me into this small despised town to expiate my sin and to be delivered.
When Balzac introduced me to my noble countryman, "The Buddha of the North," by means of his book _Séraphita_, he showed me the evangelistic side of the Prophet. Now it is the Law which encounters, crushes, and releases.
A single word suffices to illuminate my soul, and to scatter my doubts and vain fancies regarding supposed enemies, electricians, black magic, etc., and this single word is "Devastation."[1] All my sufferings I find described by Swedenborg--the feelings of suffocation (angina pectoris), constrictions of the chest, palpitations, the sensation which I called the "electric girdle"--all exactly correspond, and these phenomena, taken together, constitute the spiritual catharsis (purification) which was already known to St. Paul, "Whom," he says speaking of someone, "I have determined to hand over to Satan for the destruction of the flesh, that the spirit might be saved in the day of the Lord Jesus," and "Among whom are Hymenæus and Alexander, whom I have delivered over to Satan, that they may be taught not to blaspheme."
When I read the visions of Swedenborg belonging to the year 1744, the year preceding his establishment of relations with the spiritual world, I discover that the Prophet has endured the same nightly tortures as I have, and what astonishes me still more is the complete identity of the symptoms, which leave me no longer room for doubting the real nature of my illness. In the _Arcana Cœlestia_, the mysterious occurrences of the last two years are explained with such convincing exactness, that I, a child of the renowned nineteenth century, am firmly convinced that there is a hell--a hell, however, on earth, and that I have just come out of it.