Page:The New View of Hell.djvu/126

 falls, so it lies; or, as a man dies, so his state remains. For man has with him in the other life all the natural memory, or the memory of the external man, but is not permitted to use it in that life wherefore it is there as a fundamental plane into which interior truths and goods fall; and if that plane is incapable of receiving the truths and goods which flow in from an interior principle, they are either extinguished, perverted or rejected." (Ibid. 4588.)

These degrees of the mind, Swedenborg tells us, exist in every man, "from his birth potentially, and actually when opened." And he tells us, also, how the higher or heavenly degrees of life are opened; and that every one after death, "enters that degree which was opened within him in the world." (Divine Love and Wisdom 238.) But evil, or the indulgence of a supremely selfish and worldly love by the natural mind, closes more and more firmly the higher or heavenly degrees.

"In such a man—[one who 'delights in all kinds of wickedness, as in adultery, fraud, revenge, blasphemy, and so on']—the spiritual mind is more and more firmly closed; the confirmation of the evil by the false especially closes it. Therefore evil and the false once confirmed, cannot be extirpated after death; this can only be done in the world by repentance." (Ibid. 262.)

I have quoted freely that the reader may see the reasons given by Swedenborg himself, why a man's ruling love cannot be changed after death; and why, therefore,