new church life : november / december 2017
becomes to my mind , one of the very most important books in print -- I will say perhaps the most important book in print , after the Word .
I think it my duty to let you know that I , for one at least , and I hope there are multitudes who feel as I do , think that the Church is under very great obligations to you personally for the version of the Arcana which you have given it . No one , however , but a scholar and somewhat familiar with the original text of that book , can understand and appreciate the difficulty of transferring the spiritual revelations of Swedenborg into a tongue so essentially materialistic as ours and preserving any considerable portion of its spirituality .
In September he wrote even more urgently :
I still think , more strongly even than when I wrote you before , that the New Church ought not to give sleep to its eyes nor slumber to its eyelids till it had provided itself with as perfect a copy as possible of the original text of the Arcana Coelestia . . . . A perfect text of Swedenborg ’ s version is only of less importance than a perfect original text of the different parts of the Bible . . . . . Leaving the Arcana without a perfect and accessible form is like leaving the Ark of the Covenant with the Philistines .
How far Mr . Bigelow followed up this proposition I do not know , but the suggestion may well have been the inspiration for the recent appeal of the president of the Convention for the preparation of a revised text of the Latin Arcana , in which the editor should make use of the original first draft preserved by the Academy of Sciences at Stockholm .
Having missed attendance at service one Sunday , Mr . Bigelow made apology to Mr . Smyth that he had not been well and that his physician had forbidden his leaving home . “ And so ,” he said , “ when I could not go out to your pasture , I thought I would hunt about and browse for myself .” Mr . Smyth asked him , “ What did you find to browse on ?” “ I read through Clowes ’ little book on Miracles ,” he said . “ All of it ?” asked Mr . Smyth . “ Certainly ,” he replied , “ a sheep has more than one stomach , you know .” He had even made marginal notes as he went , Mr . Smyth reports , “ and he told me that he had about made up his mind to republish the book in an enlarged form as he thought it was just the sort of book for people who are troubled about that subject .”
He did not take much of an interest in the organization of the Church , its ecclesiasticisms and the questions arising out of its external form and activities . On the same authority that we have already quoted , we know that “ he deplored the subjects of controversy that have disquieted the Church . To him Jerusalem was a place of walls and bulwarks and not a place for throwing stones .”
To an interviewer who asked him as to his being a Swedenborgian , he answered :
“ I am a great admirer of Swedenborg and believe that he understood the Bible better than anyone except those who wrote it . But I do not like the
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