Page:The New View of Hell.djvu/60

 port of the terms heaven and hell?—for in their obvious literal sense, they are both used to designate natural localities—one a high and illumined, the other a low and dark place. According to what principle or law is their true meaning to be elicited?

Swedenborg answers this question, as no one else has ever answered it. (Let the reader, if he would appreciate the full force of the answer, bear in mind that the Bible everywhere represents heaven and hell as opposite kingdoms—opposite as light and darkness, love and hate, truth and falsity, righteousness and sin, happiness and misery)—He tells us that the written Word is composed throughout upon the principle of correspondence; that, between all natural and spiritual things, there is a correspondence like that existing between the body and the soul; and that the Sacred Scripture, therefore, in each and all its parts, contains both a spiritual and a natural sense, which stand related like the spiritual and the natural worlds, or like the soul and body of man. The spiritual sense is as the soul; the natural sense, as the body. As the body's life is from the indwelling soul or spirit, so the life of every part of the written Word is from the spiritual sense. The body of man without the soul, has no life; neither is there life in the letter of the Word when divorced from its inner spiritual meaning. It is by virtue of their spiritual sense that the Lord's words are spirit and life; for he says: "The words that I speak unto you, they are spirit and they are life." And