The difficulties of evangelical ‘system’ in the West

In the Anglophone world the difficulties encountered by evangelicalism in Northern and Central Europe were repeated on a bigger scale as both the repute and the real power of established institutions were diminished by social change and by the impact of the French Revolution. Swedenborg and Oetinger in their different ways had tried to restore or remake the general setting of evangelical thought that had once been provided by Paracelsianism. The former, however, had been repudiated by evangelicals in violent terms, and had in any case turned his back on the working science on which he had made his name. Like his father Bishop Svedberg, he had concluded that science and technology did not afford the necessary key to meaning, but, by going over wholesale to a visionary activity that was out of proportion to anything known in the Protestant world, he had effectively closed the gates to any return. Would the Swedenborgian New Church descend from the heavens? Was it embodied in an English Methodism gradually asserting its independence from the established Church? Or was it still concealed in the womb of the Church of England? Convincing negative answers were given to each of these three questions within fifty years of Swedenborg's death. As if this were not enough, English Swedenborgianism now became characterised by vegetarian convictions; in other words it had been moved by its adherents from a credo seeking to answer questions thrown up by European high culture into a set of beliefs purporting to enable silk-workers and other labouring men to cope with their daily problems.