Page:The New View of Hell.djvu/181

 and how earnestly should we seek the Divine protecting sphere! How anxious should we be to know the truth, and how careful to govern our lives according to its requirements—ever acknowledging the Lord's own immediate presence and power in the truths we learn and do! This is the only way we can secure for ourselves the protection of that Arm which alone can shield us against the power of hell.

How imminent is our spiritual danger, how watchful we ought to be over our hearts and lives, how much we need the Divine protection, and how that protection is best ensured, will appear from the following extract from Swedenborg's Heaven and Hell:

"Every spirit is his own good or his own evil, because he is his own love. Therefore, as an angelic spirit thinks, wills, speaks, and acts from his own good, so does an infernal spirit from his own evil; and to think, will, speak, and act, from evil itself, is to do so from all the things which are included in the evil. It was otherwise when he lived in the body. The evil of the man's spirit was then restrained by the bonds, in which every one is held by the law, by his love of gain and honor, and through fear of losing them; on which account the evil of his spirit could not then break out, and manifest itself in its own intrinsic nature. Besides, the evil of the man's spirit then lay wrapped up and veiled in external probity, sincerity, justice, and the affection of truth and good, of which such a man has made an oral profes-