=A World of Delusion.=--"Swedenborg writes: 'The angels are troubled concerning the darkness on earth. They say that they can see hardly any light anywhere, that men live and strengthen themselves in lying and deceit, and so heap up falsity upon falsity. In order to ratify these, they manage to extract, by way of inference, such true propositions from false premises, as, on account of the darknesses which conceal the true sources, and because the real state of the case is unknown, cannot be refuted.' "This agrees with what every thinking man observes, that lying and deceit are universal. The whole of life--politics, society, marriage, the family--is counterfeit. Views which universally prevail are based upon false history; scientific theories are founded on error; the truth of to-day is discovered to be a lie to-morrow; the hero turns out to be a coward, the martyr a hypocrite. Te Deums are sung over a silver wedding, and the wedded pair, still secretly leading immoral lives, thank God that they have lived together happily for five-and-twenty years. The whole populace assembles once in a year to celebrate the memory of the 'Destroyer of the Country.' He who says the most foolish thing possible, receives a prize in money and a gold medal. At the annual asses' festival, the worst is crowned the asses' king. "A mad world, my masters! If Hamlet plays the madman, he sees how mad the world is. But the spectator believes himself to be the only reasonable person, therefore He gives Hamlet his sympathy." =The Conversion of the Cheerful Pagan, Horace.=--"Among the conventional falsehoods of the apes,[1] one of the best known is that conversion from irreligion is a purely Christian doctrine. By looking into Kumlin's Swedish translation of Horace, even a schoolboy can find this heading to the thirty-fourth ode of the first book, 'The Religious Conversion of the Poet.' "Horace belonged to the Epicurean sect who only believed in phantom gods, because they held that the divinities did not trouble themselves with the course of the world or of events, but enjoyed a careless life of continual ease. Horace accordingly had not been remarkably zealous in his religious duties. But a sudden flash of lightning and a heavy peal of thunder from a clear sky taught him at last that it was no blind unconscious force of nature, but the hand of a God, which hurled the lightning. Thereby he was awoken to reflection, and tried to warn and sober his frivolous countrymen by dwelling on the power of Jupiter. 'God can change the lowest with the highest; He puts down the exalted and uplifts the obscure.' "After this Horace preached like a Jeremiah against the corruption of religion and morals. A modern 'ape' might feel justified in calling him a pietist since he was converted!