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fellow-countrymen. Astonished at my ignorance,
they give me, with a certain air of reserve, however,
an old volume in German, saying, “Take
it, read, and don’t be afraid.”
“Afraid? Why should I be?” I answer.
Returning to the rose-coloured room, I open
the book at haphazard and read. The reader
may conceive my astonishment when my eyes
fall on the description of one of Swedenborg’s
hells which exactly reproduces the landscape of
Klam, as I saw it in the zinc bath. The crater-shaped
valley, the pine-crowned hill, the ravine
with the stream, the heaps of dung, the
pig-sty—they are all there.
Hell? But I have been brought up in the
profoundest contempt of the doctrine of hell,
as one consigned to the rubbish-heap of out-worn
ideas. And yet I cannot deny the fact—and
that is the novelty in this exposition of
the doctrine of so-called eternal punishment—we
are already in hell. Earth, earth is hell—the
dungeon appointed by a superior power, in
which I cannot move a step without injuring
the happiness of others, and in which others
cannot remain happy without hurting me. Thus
Swedenborg depicts hell, and perhaps without
knowing it, earthly life, at the same time.
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