the neck of an Indian bird. I should need to embrace the whole
world, to clasp and re-create it; but those who have done this,
who have thus embraced and remoulded it began--did they not?--by
being a wheel in the machine. I can only be crushed. Mahomet had
the sword; Jesus had the cross; I shall die unknown. I shall be at
Blois for a day, and then in my coffin.

"Do you know why I have come back to Swedenborg after vast studies
of all religions, and after proving to myself, by reading all the
works published within the last sixty years by the patient
English, by Germany, and by France, how deeply true were my
youthful views about the Bible? Swedenborg undoubtedly epitomizes
all the religions--or rather the one religion--of humanity. Though
forms of worship are infinitely various, neither their true
meaning nor their metaphysical interpretation has ever varied. In
short, man has, and has had, but one religion.

"Sivaism, Vishnuism, and Brahmanism, the three primitive creeds,
originating as they did in Thibet, in the valley of the Indus, and
on the vast plains of the Ganges, ended their warfare some
thousand years before the birth of Christ by adopting the Hindoo
Trimourti. The Trimourti is our Trinity. From this dogma Magianism
arose in Persia; in Egypt, the African beliefs and the Mosaic law;
the worship of the Cabiri, and the polytheism of Greece and Rome.
While by this ramification of the Trimourti the Asiatic myths
became adapted to the imaginations of various races in the lands
they reached by the agency of certain sages whom men elevated to
be demi-gods--Mithra, Bacchus, Hermes, Hercules, and the rest
--Buddha, the great reformer of the three primeval religions, lived
in India, and founded his Church there, a sect which still numbers
two hundred millions more believers than Christianity can show,
while it certainly influenced the powerful Will both of Jesus and
of Confucius.

"Then Christianity raised her standard. Subsequently Mahomet fused
Judaism and Christianity, the Bible and the Gospel, in one book,
the Koran, adapting them to the apprehension of the Arab race.
Finally, Swedenborg borrowed from Magianism, Brahmanism, Buddhism,
and Christian mysticism all the truth and divine beauty that those
four great religious books hold in common, and added to them a
doctrine, a basis of reasoning, that may be termed mathematical.

"Any m