During this visit to General Tuxen, in the course of other conversation, Tuxen produced an autobiographical letter which Swedenborg had written to Hartley, and which began, “I was born in the year 1689.” Swedenborg told him that he was not born in that year, as mentioned, but in the preceding. Tuxen asked him if this was an error of the press. He said “No;” and added, “you may remember in reading my writings to have seen it stated in many parts, that every cipher or number has in the spiritual sense a certain correspondence or signification. Now,” said he, “when I put the true year in that letter, an angel present told me to write the year 1689, as much more suitable to myself than the other; ‘and you observe,’ added the angel, ‘that with us time and space are nothing.’” We give these anecdotes as Tuxen relates them. Every one, however, will know from his private experience how little absolute dependence is to be placed upon narrations of conversations, or actions, by even the most truthful. Sir Walter Raleigh, while writing his History of the World, was led to think of the errors into which he might be led, by observing that an affray beneath his prison wall was variously described by several eye-witnesses. If the occurrences of the present are so liable to misstatement, what sort of faith can we place in the history of the past? Wilkinson, commenting on this anecdote of the date of Swedenborg’s birth, remarks, in his usual keen style: “We have here a reason for that modification of events according to a context, of which the Gospel histories, so often discrepant from each other, furnish numerous instances. Manifestly it is the plan of the context which regards the events from its own point of view, and paints the narrative in its own colors. It is what all historians do in a lesser way, bending the history to ideas, or shaping it with an artistic force. Taking a certain larger block of time as a period of birth, it is hieroglyphically truthful to play down upon any date contained in the block, according to the subject and signification. There are many kinds of truth besides black and white; and generally, figurative truths require latitude of phrase. At the same time it must be confessed that one would like to know when the writing is pure history, and when it is a base of history, made use of for symbolical purposes, and touched, in part, by spirit. Literal people are apt to be offended otherwise, and we sympathize with them.”