Page:Letters on the Future Life, addressed to Henry Ward Beecher.djvu/57

Rh "Most of those recently deceased, when they saw that they were still alive and men as before, and in a similar state, (for after death every one's state of life is at first such as it had been in the world, but that is gradually changed either into heaven or into hell,) were affected with new joy at being alive, and declared that they had not believed this. But they wondered very much that they should have lived in such ignorance and blindness concerning the state of their life after death; and especially that the man of the church should be in such ignorance and blindness."—H. H. 312.

You know that the prevailing idea among Christians in Swedenborg's time was, that the soul or spirit of man was a subtle essence, an ethereal vapor, a thinking principle without organization, substance, or form of any kind. But can you conceive of a being capable of faith, hope, and charity,—capable of thinking, reasoning, rejoicing, and loving, without some kind of an organized form? Or can you conceive of a being endowed with human capacities without possessing the human form? I cannot.

The following is Swedenborg's testimony on this subject—very different, you observe, from the current belief of his day:

"That the spirit of man after its separation from the body is itself a man, and similar in form, has been proved