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The New Jerusalem now counts its population at 17,000, scattered through every sizable country in the world except China. The U. S. shelters 7,000 Swedenborgians with 100 churches. Because outsiders were inclined to confuse it with Judaism, members now refer to their organization simply as the New Church. The New Church patterns its services on the Episcopalian, its administrative set-up on the Congregational. In 1890 some members, deciding that Emanuel Swedenborg's revelations of the Scriptures' hidden meanings had hidden meanings all their own, began to incorporate his writings in their services. Result: a schism, creating the General Church of the New Jerusalem which now has 2,500 members and the No. 1 Swedenborgian academy at Bryn Athyn, Pa.
Except for a cautious approach to birth control, last week's 114th General Convention of the New Church in Detroit stuck strictly to routine business. A few delegates lamented the Church's failure to proselytize the 40,000 persons who last year bought 5¢ copies of Heaven and Hell from its loosely affiliated Swedenborg Foundation in Manhattan.
Queen Victoria's mother belonged to the New Church, as does Mrs. Frank A. Vanderlip. present at the Detroit convention. Publishers Clarence Barren of the Wall Street Journal and John Bigelow of the New York Evening Post were members. Contemplation in a New Church church in London inspired Poet William Blake to write his "Songs of Innocence." In formal or spiritual fellowship Swedenborgians also claim Goethe, Wagner, Berlioz, Balzac, Coleridge, Tennyson, Browning, Carlyle, Emerson, Thoreau, Victor Hugo, Henry James, Andrew Carnegie, Maeterlinck, Yeats, Helen Keller, Elbert Hubbard, Amelita Galli-Curci and Eddie Guest.