Page:The New View of Hell.djvu/127

 the hells must be eternal in duration. And they are reasons, we observe, growing out of, harmonizing with, and making indeed a part of, his grand and comprehensive system of spiritual philosophy. So that, in adopting a different view from the one he has taught in regard to the duration of the hells—in denying their eternity, and insisting that, some time or other and in some way or other, the ruling love will be changed after death, and the devils be all converted into angels—we not only reject a doctrine as clearly revealed as anything can be, but we are compelled also to sweep away so much of his spiritual philosophy as would leave his whole system tottering. We are compelled to deny that the life's love can become so inwrought into the spiritual organism during one's earthly pilgrimage, that an entire change in the quality of the love would involve annihilation, or a total destruction of the soul's organism (C. L. 524; H. H. 480). We are compelled to deny, what we are repeatedly assured the angels affirm, that the interior things of the mind, resting for ever on the ultimate or natural plane of life developed here on earth "like a house on its foundation," will for ever be in Harmony or correspondence with that plane. (Ibid.) We must deny, too, that there is any such eternal and indissoluble connection between the life here and the life hereafter, as Swedenborg has declared; or that any such cleansing of the external or natural man here below as he alleges, is essential to that internal purification without which there