Guillaume Caspar Lencroy Oegger was a French Catholic priest who became a follower of
Emanuel Swedenborg’s New Church around 1826. His works stress the possibility of linking the natural and spiritual worlds through direct illuminations, a sense of absolute dependence of the individual consciousness on God, and a belief in a “language of nature” that corresponds to spiritual things. His largest and perhaps most significant work,
Le Vrai Messie, or
The True Messiah, published in 1829 in Paris, inspired
Ralph Waldo Emerson a great deal. In 1835 Emerson read an English translation of the first 60 pages by Transcendentalist
Elizabeth Palmer Peabody, who published her manuscript in 1842.