Page:Beauty for Ashes.djvu/74

 "As soon as infants are raised from the dead, which takes place immediately after their decease, they are carried up into heaven, and delivered to the care of angels of the female sex, who in the life of the body loved infants tenderly, and at the same time loved God. Since these angels when in the world loved all infants from a sort of maternal tenderness, they receive them as their own; and the infants also, from an affection implanted in them, love them as their own mothers. Every female angel has as many infants under her care, as she desires from a spiritual maternal affection.

"The difference between those who die infants and those who die at mature age, shall also be explained. They who die adults have a plane acquired from the earthly and material world, which they carry along with them. This plane is their memory and its corporeal natural affection. After death this plane remains fixed, and is quiescent; but still it serves as the ultimate plane of thought, for the thought flows into it. Hence it is, that, according to the quality of that plane, and the correspondence of the rational principle with the things contained in it, such is the quality of the man after death. But they who die in infancy, and are educated in heaven, have not such a plane, but a spiritual-natural plane, since they derive nothing from the material world and the terrestrial body; wherefore they cannot be in such gross affections and thence in such gross thoughts, because they derive all things from heaven. Besides, infants do not know that they were born in the world, and therefore they suppose that they were born in heaven; consequently they know nothing of any birth but the spiritual birth, which is effected by knowledges of good and truth, and by intelligence and wisdom, by virtue of which man is man; and since these principles are from the Lord, they believe, and love to believe, that they are the children of the Lord Himself. Nevertheless the state of men