new church life: november/december 2017
story may best be told in his own words in his Retrospections of an Active Life:
Owing to my preoccupation with the preparations for our departure from St.
Thomas, I failed to make any record in my diary of quite the most important event
which occurred to me in the course of my visit to the Antilles in the winter of 1853-
4. During the second week of my sojourn on the island of St. Thomas, Mr. Kierolf
and I chanced both to be seated in the spacious, but then otherwise deserted dining
hall of Bonelli’s Hotel, he at one end and I at the other, both with books in our
hands.
[Here Rev. Alden added a footnote: The Writings of Swedenborg were introduced
into the Danish West Indies by a Swedish jurist, Mr. H. G. Linberg, who had
taken a prominent part in the early New Church movements in Stockholm and
Philadelphia. He resided for some time in Harrisburg, PA., but in 1830 became
Judge of the High Court of St. Croix. His first converts were two brothers, Carl A.
Kierulff and U. Kierulff, attorneys-at-law in the neighboring island of St. Thomas. A
small New Church Society was organized in 1841, and maintained itself for many
years, but is now extinct. - C. Th. O.]
I was reading the Bible. I had read everything readable that I had brought with me
from home, and had bought and read everything readable in the solitary bookstore
in St. Thomas. I had done the island thoroughly, and my Bible was all that was left
upon which to expend my superfluity of leisure. It so happened that I was reading
the 12 th chapter of Genesis, which gives the account of Abram, who had been driven
by a famine into Egypt. When I had finished the chapter I said to Mr. Kierolf, “Is
it not extraordinary that this book should be accepted by the most highly civilized
nations of the earth as the Word of God? Just listen.” I then read the verse in which
the patriarch passed off Sarah, his wife, for his sister.
“This Abram,” said I, “is the man whom it is pretended the Lord selected from all
the people of the earth as most deserving of His favor, and promised to make of him
a great nation; to bless them that bless him; to curse them that curse him, and that
in him all the families of the earth should be blessed. And yet almost the first thing
we hear of him is his commanding his wife to tell a falsehood, which inevitably
exposed her to insult and degradation, apparently for the sole purpose of saving
himself from apprehended, but as the event proved, imaginary dangers. Does not
the Egyptian, whom the Bible represents as the oppressor of God’s people, appear,
according to our standards at least, to have been the better man of the two?”
“Well, yes,” replied Mr. Kierolf, “it does appear so at first.”
“But,” said I, “does it not appear so all the time?”
Mr. Kierolf seemed to rather avoid a direct answer to my question, and, in turn,
asked me if I had ever read any of the writings of Swedenborg. I said that I could
not say that I had. “Well,” said Mr. Kierolf, “in his Arcana Coelestia Swedenborg has
given an exposition of the chapter you have been reading, which, perhaps, would
satisfy you that there is more in it than you seem to suspect.”
I intimated mildly that there was no obscurity about the meaning, and that I did not
see how anyone could get any impression of those verses different from mine. Mr.
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