ABSTRACT
A Behmenist Anglican clergyman, Thomas Hartley, gave to Englishmen the news of a new dispensation, proclaimed as having taken place in 1757. Englishmen were introduced to it in 1778, by Thomas Hartley's translation of Emanuel Swedenborg's Heaven and its Wonders, and Hell: From Things Heard and Seen. This proclaimed the dissolution of Babylon in the spiritual world. In 1757 the old Church, according to Swedenborg, had perished and a new revelation was amplifying its lost truths, and a new spiritual age beginning. Swedenborg claimed to have visited the spiritual world as a preparation for understanding the word of God, and interpreting it at a higher level: a ‘pure correspondence’ between spiritual and material things. Every material thing embodied an eternal truth. As he said :–
As often as I conversed with angels face to face, it was in their habitations, which are like to our houses on earth, but far more beautiful and magnificent, having rooms, chambers and apartments in great variety; as also spacious courts belonging to them, together with the gardens, pictures of flowers, where the angels are formed into societies. They dwell in contiguous habitations, disposed after the manner of our cities and streets, walks and squares. I have had the privilege to walk through them, to examine all round about, and to enter their houses, and this when I was fully awake. 89
