We now close the first book of Swedenborg’s life, and open the second. Emphatically his was a double life. So rich in thought and action were both parts, that either would have been reckoned sufficient to render him a remarkable man. The one life was an orderly and regular growth out of the other: the first was a providential preparation for the second. Carefully disciplined by thought and investigation in the outer world, through a long series of laborious years, the curtain which separated the seen from the unseen was, for him, drawn aside, and his prepared eyes saw in clear sunlight those mysteries of life and spirit, which the best and wisest of men have most ardently desired to see. Let us, then, leave Swedenborg the Man of Science, and turn to him as the Servant of the Lord Jesus Christ, the worthy exponent of the spiritual sense of the Word of God, and the announcer of the New Era in which reason and faith are to be at one, and men everywhere friends and brothers. CHAPTER VIII. _His Spiritual Sight opened, and the Conditions of his Seership._ We will now proceed, without circumlocution, to lay before our readers, in all its fullness, the claim which Swedenborg made, at this period, to open intercourse with the spiritual world, under the sanction and protection of the Lord. This assumption runs through the whole of his after life, and without a clear idea of its nature and conditions, we shall be unable rightly to appreciate aught else that follows. In one of his letters, he says, “I have been called to a holy office by the Lord himself, who most graciously manifested himself to me, his servant, in the year 1743, when he opened my sight to a view of the spiritual world, and granted me the privilege of conversing with spirits and angels, which I enjoy to this day. From that time, I began to print and publish various arcana that have been seen by me, or revealed to me; as respecting heaven and hell, the state of man after death, the true worship of God, the spiritual sense of the Word, with many other most important matters conducive to salvation and true wisdom.” Again, in the preface to his work entitled, “Arcana Cœlestia,” he writes: “Of the Lord’s Divine mercy, it has been granted me now for several years to be constantly and uninterruptedly in company with spirits and angels, hearing them converse with each other, and conversing with them. Hence it has been permitted me to hear and see stupendous things in the other life, which have never before come to the knowledge of any man, nor entered his imagination. I have there been instructed concerning different kinds of spirits, and the state of souls after death; concerning hell, or the lamentable state of the unfaithful; concerning heaven, or the most happy state of the faithful; and particularly concerning the doctrine of faith which is acknowledged throughout all heaven.”