Page:The Doctrines of the New Church Briefly Explained.djvu/212

206 do not become altogether fitted in this world for the society of angels. The ruling love may be right, yet the habits of thought, feeling and action—all the things of the outward life—have not yet been brought into perfect agreement with the spirit of heaven. Something of the old man still remains to be put off, before the life is altogether angelic. And among the unregenerate, few become so entirely depraved in this world as to be altogether devilish. Nearly all the wicked retain, while on earth, some good qualities—externally if not internally. Few are so thoroughly false and evil from centre to circumference, that they are fitted for the society of devils as soon as they enter the other world. So that the wicked—those who are internally such, yet have some external goodness appertaining to them—remain, for a greater or less time after death, in the intermediate state or world of spirits.

But the process by which the interiors are developed or uncovered, and the hidden things of one's life are made known, commences immediately after death, and proceeds with greater rapidity in the world of spirits than it does in this world. The change is comparatively like that which takes place with plants when removed from a cold to a tropical region, where they are brought under the more direct rays of the sun. And as the process goes on, whereby the interiors are laid open and