Page:Heaven Revealed.djvu/243

 they will, erelong, convert the loveliest habitation into a squalid stye. Place them where you will, amid whatever scenes of beauty or magnificence, and they cannot fail in time to stamp their own character on all their surroundings. And on the other hand, place people of refinement and culture in the humblest cabin, and will they not in time so beautify and adorn that cabin, that it will reveal to the intelligent observer something of their refined and cultivated tastes? And the reason is obvious; for every kind of life is delighted with, and therefore seeks, that and only that which corresponds with its own nature.

And the same great law that fashions the habitations and the whole outward aspect of heaven, is (as might be expected, if true) no less operative or potential in hell. Character (good or bad) shapes each one's house and all his surroundings in the other world, in complete correspondence with itself. And while the heavenly abodes are all inconceivably bright and beautiful, those of the nether regions are correspondingly dark and loathsome. Says Swedenborg:

"All those who are in evil, and have confirmed themselves in falsities against the truths of the church, and especially those who have rejected the Word, [in the other world] shun the light of heaven, and betake themselves to subterranean places and clefts of the rocks, and hide there. And they seek such retreats because they have loved falsities and hated truths; for such caverns and clefts of rocks and darkness correspond to falsities, and light corresponds to truth. . . They who have been sordidly avaricious dwell in huts and love swinish filth [such things being in correspondence with their state of life]."—H. H. n. 488.