ABSTRACT
The Swedenborg Society may certainly be designated, though hardly the organised New Church itself. The first and most obvious strength of the Swedenborgians was their ability to integrate those two most powerful thrusts of the period, popular evangelism and a search for a stately, aesthetic and emotionally satisfying mode of worship. Swedenborgianism enjoyed a period of social and intellectual respectability in England in the 1840s which it had not experienced before. A map of ‘mystical Britain’ and one of Swedenborgian evangelistic success would show a remarkable overlap. The very core of Swedenborg’s teaching, one’s understanding progressing from the literal to the spiritual to the celestial sense both of Scripture and of created things. According to Swedenborg, in regard to the heavens and the hells, it is the Ruling Love of a Hindu, Jew or Muslim that makes a person an angel or a devil – and the angelic host recruits from all over the world.
