Excerpt from Annals of the New Church, Vol. 1: With a Chronological Account of the Life of Emanuel Swedenborg, 1688-1850 The Science of History, like Clio among the Muses, is chief among the handmaids that serve the knowledge and worship of God. It is chief among those instrumentals which may render man rational, for it affords the ratio or comparative relation of present things with all things of the past, which is most essential to the rational faculty. History, in a supreme sense, is the record of the Divine Providence among men; it is the summary of the collective experience of mankind under the overruling govern ment of the lord, and through this science men may see con firmed, by objective illustration, the lessons of wisdom which are taught, subjectively, in the written Word of God. But in order to serve this purpose, History, like every exact science, must be founded, ultimately, upon the solid rocks of actual facts. Without these facts there may be theory, indeed, but not Science. Hence we find that chronicles lie at the basis of all History. The History of the lord's New Church, the Church of the New Jerusalem, has not yet been written, nor can it be written until the facts of her past experiences have been collected. These facts lie hidden, at present, in several thousand different volumes, published in many different tongues, distributed in widely distant libraries, and thus inaccessible to the general student. Before a philosophical and yet exact History of the New Church can be written, these scattered and imprisoned facts must be brought to gether, in order that the historian or historians of the Church may have the necessary materials at hand. The stones must be pro cured before the building can be erected. About the Publisher Forgotten Books publishes hundreds of thousands of rare and classic books. Find more at www.forgottenbooks.com This book is a reproduction of an important historical work. Forgotten Books uses state-of-the-art technology to digitally reconstruct the work, preserving the original format whilst repairing imperfections present in the aged copy. In rare cases, an imperfection in the original, such as a blemish or missing page, may be replicated in our edition. We do, however, repair the vast majority of imperfections successfully; any imperfections that remain are intentionally left to preserve the state of such historical works.