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 destitute of religious truth. With all the errors and absurdities in the Mahometan and Pagan religions, there are to be found many important truths, many wholesome precepts, many laws of heavenly charity. And all who obey these laws from a principle of religion, are thereby saved from the evils they forbid. And not only this, but fidelity to the little truth they know, prepares them for the reception of more and higher truth when they enter the other world. A person may be born amid such surroundings that he will be brought up in great ignorance and even in the belief of great errors, and yet be preserved in a state of child-like innocence. And as this is a state receptive of wisdom, such person will readily receive instruction in the world of spirits, and be there fitted for the kingdom of heaven in the way that children are. We may thus see how it is possible for people in the non-Christian nations, to be finally admitted into heaven, notwithstanding the many errors they imbibed on earth. Indeed they may, on account of their greater innocence and simplicity, receive instruction in the other world more readily than many Christians.

"Occasionally," says Swedenborg, "it has been granted me to converse with Christians in another life concerning the state and lot of the Gentiles out of the church, that they receive the truths and goods of faith more easily than Christians who have not lived according to the Lord's precepts; and that Christians think cruelly concerning them in supposing that all who are out of the church are damned, and this in consequence of a received canon, that out of the Lord there is no salvation; and that this is true, but that the Gentiles who have lived in mutual charity, and have done what is just and equitable