34. [Swedenborg's Answer to Count Carl Rudenskjold, January 1772]
*No one can get any knowledge of [Prince of Sachs Coburg Saalfeldt's spiritual home] because they themselves do not know how they died or perished in the world; for with them, death is not seen as death but as an entrance into the other life and a continuation of the former, and therefore they are in the full belief and thought that there is no more death. Therefore, to ask any one concerning his departure from this world seems to them like a question concerning a thing which cannot happen. Moreover, it is difficult to come upon one who departed twenty-seven years ago. He is already settled in a society into which it is difficult for me to enter. To question the angels about it-so neither do they have such knowledge; and it is too small a matter to ask the Lord Christ Himself about it. For the rest, I wish you the Lord's blessing.
* Some time in 1771, Swedenborg received an inquiry into the fate of some one in the spiritual world. It came to him in the shape of a note from Count Carl Rudenskjold (1698-1782), then a member of the Privy Council. From 1739-1747, Rudenskjold had been the Swedish Minister and Envoy at the Court of Fredrick the Great. Being a great favorite with the King, he must have had a wide acquaintance with the German nobility. In 1771, he received a letter from Sachs Coburg-Saalfeldt, enclosing a Pro Memoria inquiring as to the possibility of obtaining through Swedenborg information in respect to the fate of a certain prince who had been lost in 1745. Count Rudenskjold copied this "Pro Memoria" and sent it to Swedenborg. Judging from his reference to a lapse of 27 years since the prince's disappearance in 1745, Swedenborg's answer must have been written in London, probably in January 1772.
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