Time & Perspective Quote by Emanuel Swedenborg

Swedenborg is doing something slyly destabilizing here: he’s stripping the living of their favorite hobby, which is auditing the spiritual health of everyone else. The line reads like a warning label for religious certainty. “Cannot be seen by any man” isn’t just humility; it’s a direct critique of the idea that institutions can be accurately judged from the inside, in real time, by people embedded in the same moral weather they’re trying to measure.

The intent is defensive and diagnostic at once. Swedenborg’s theological project depended on claiming access to a deeper, invisible structure of reality - the “quality” of the church as an inward state rather than a public brand. By insisting that the true condition of “the Lord’s church” is unreadable to ordinary perception, he disqualifies both triumphalist church histories and scandal-driven declinism. He’s also inoculating his own movement: if decline is hard to detect, and if outward forms deceive, then new revelations and reforms can be framed as necessary rather than schismatic.

The subtext sharpens in the second clause: “still less” can read like an indictment of hindsight narratives that treat corruption as obvious and inevitable. Swedenborg suggests that the drift “from good to evil” is gradual, spiritual, and camouflaged by ritual continuity. Coming from a scientist-turned-mystic in the Enlightenment era, it’s a fascinating hybrid move: an epistemological claim (your instruments don’t reach this domain) used to re-center authority away from public evidence and toward inner discernment. It’s less anti-judgment than anti-certainty - and it leaves the comfortable moral scorekeepers with nothing solid to stand on.