We have in the Old and New Testaments together no less than seventy different revelations made by the Lord to almost as many different persons and on almost as many different occasions, within a period of sixteen hundred years. What reason was there for supposing that John, any more than Malachi, or than Isaiah, or than Solomon, or than David, or than Joshua, or than Abraham, or than Moses, was to be the last to whom He would reveal Himself? And would it not have seemed, reasoning from the past, more surprising had He not made any further revelation of Himself in the next seventeen centuries than that He did? What did He mean when He said to His disciples, "I have yet many things to say unto you, but ye cannot bear them now," if not that when His disciples were fit to know more of righteousness, temperance and judgment to come, more would be revealed to them - that they would hear from Him again?

As for the agent through whom to make new revelations, I had no difficulty in acknowledging the entire sufficiency and fitness of Swedenborg, nor does my memory suggest the name of any one man who lived before or since the time of Jesus more thoroughly equipped for such an extraordinary commission; of any medium through which the light of Divine truth would pass with less refraction. It is not possible to find any authority for supposing that any of those who had been previously selected by the Lord as such media possessed any qualifications for their mission which, mutatis mutandis, Swedenborg did not possess for his, while, humanly speaking, it is doing none of the others any injustice to say that for his peculiar mission he possessed many qualifications which all the others presumably lacked. At his maturity, he was the most illustrious scientific man living. He consecrated his extraordinary talents to the loftiest and most elevating uses. He was a favorite of his king because of his usefulness; there were hardly any worldly honors or political distinctions he did not receive to which he might not have aspired. He laid them all down to devote himself exclusively to the work to which he believed the Lord had called him, neither receiving nor desiring any reward from the world for his labors or his sacrifices. He not only printed all his books at his private expense, but as fast as printed gave them all away, mostly to libraries, to await the time when the world would realize its need of them, having implicit faith that the Lord would in His own good time breathe into them the breath of life.

I had no longer any difficulty therefore with what at first seemed like an impeachment of the completeness and sufficiency of the Bible, and I came to regard every revelation of spiritual truth, from Moses down the ages, as merely successive liftings of veils, the dispersing of clouds, for the revelation of vital truths of which all nature is the Divine Scripture, and the Bible its translation and interpreter, but which the children of men are prepared to accept only, as it were, by installments. Neither had I any further difficulty in regarding Swedenborg as a suitable agent for the reception of a new revelation, as much so as any of the twelve Apostles appear to have been.