The Blackpool Herald. — 1880-08-27 (Blackpool, Lancashire, England)

SWEDENBORG.  TO THE IMO& 812,-1 read your short editorial of Friday on the Blackpool Free Library with considerable surprise, especially your remarks on Swedenborg's Conjugial Love." You describe that work as " immoral" and "indecent," and class it with Mr Bradlangh's work on the "Fruits of Philosophy." Now I and hundreds more have read Swedenborg's " Conjugial Love" repeatedly, and regard it as setting forth the sanctity of marriage in afar higher sense than is done in any other book we have read except the Bible, and I should like you to point oat the passage, fully and fairly quoted, which either teaches immorality or has an immoral tendency. But perhaps you intend your remarks to apply not to conjugtal love, but to adulterous love, which is bound up in the same volume at the end. After treating upon true marriage love, then Swedenborg treats upon its opposite, adulterous , love, and show& it to be most sinful. He char-1 acterises adultery as the most atrocious crime a person can commit, and speaks of it as closing heaven against man, when knowingly and deliberately entered into. 'Ti. true, he shews there are many degrees of sinfulness in this love, some forms being very malignant, and others less so, but all alike being unhallowed and vile. As a judge, adjudicating upon crime, sometimes finds that circumstances will extenuate the crime of murder, theft, or fraud, so Swedenborg shows that circumstances and the motive animating the person will extenuate the crimes of fornication and adultery. It is in discriminating upon these that he speaks of concubinage as preferable to fragrant adultery, not not because it is not sinful, but because it is the lesser of two evils. ;And if Swedenborg is to be accused of advocating concubinage because of this, then the Bible is to be charged with advocating both concubinage and polygamy, because it sanctioned these among the Jew.; when yet our Saviour tells us, that because of the hardness of their hearts Moses suffered these things to be, but in the beginning it was not so. But could Swedenborg be the advocate of such immorality, and live a &y and chaste life himself. I know that it has been said he kept a mistress, but there is not a tittle of evidence for this, except hearsay, and the whole testimony of his life is dead against it. Would his followers condemn such immorality, if Swedenborg himself openly advocated it, and would they repudiate it as most vile, when any of their fraternity lapsed into the sin if it were thus openly excused by their acknowledged author? Assuredly not, and to describe it as such shews a very limited knowledge of the work itself, and a very mistaken understanding of its spirit and teaching. How far it is wise to place in the hands of all such a philosophical disquisition on the relative sinfulness of varied forms of adulterous love, I leave with the committee and the public, but to describe it as immoral and indecent is neither true nor just. I must kindly ask you therefore to insert this letter in defence of the book itself, and as a slight vindication of the author from the wrong which has, doubtless, been unintentionally done to him. August 25th, 1880.  W. W.  Übe writer of the above letter admits the justice of what we urged last week whenhe doubts the wisdom of allowing such a book to come within the reach of "all" frequenters of the Free Library. In a large Free Library, like that at Mane.hester, such a book might only be sought after for innocent purposes. In so small a library as ours is yet, it would come obtrusively under the inspection of almost every reader.— Ed.]