Page:Emanuel Swedenborg, Scientist and Mystic.djvu/298

282 crafty they may be, but as in hell everyone wants to command (while in heaven all want to serve) trouble soon arises. Incidentally Swedenborg remarks that the pangs of conscience are not the pangs of hell, for those who are capable of pangs of conscience are not spiritually dead, therefore not in hell.

With a lightning phrase Swedenborg says that the forms of those in hell are "those of contempt for others." Some are reduced to a bundle of ugly teeth. "In general, evil spirits are forms of contempt for others, or forms of hatreds and revenge. They are full of menaces for those who do not pay them respect . . . but if worshiped they can look pleased for a while. Each looks as his ruling passion is."

Swedenborg wondered at the monstrous forms of the love of self, for, he said, in the world the haughty love of self is regarded as a kind of noble and necessary spur to action, the fire of life itself, honor and glory.

In Swedenborg's view love of self was to do good only for one's own sake, or for one's children and grandchildren who really, he said, are part of the man himself and called his own.

Imagine a community, Swedenborg said, of such as love only themselves and others only as they seem part of them, and you will see that their love is only as that among robbers, who kiss and call each other friends as long as they act in common, but who wish to slay and destroy the others if they protest their dominion. They laugh at everything which is divine.

Of such is hell. The worst are the deceitful egoists, he said, since deceit presses deeply into thought and purpose and poisons them and disturbs all spiritual life. But with many the evil in their souls has been so wrapped up in outer honesty and decency that they hardly know themselves what devils they are. It takes death to reveal them to themselves.

Eternal slander, quarreling, hate, and unfriendliness fill the horrid little towns in hell, or rather in the hells, since each inhabitant in a sense creates his own, but enough are like-minded to have similar districts. In the milder departments are huts that sometimes are arranged as if in streets; from those huts come the noise of brawls and fights. Some are like ruined cities after fire. Others are