Page:The Other Life.djvu/127

 The societies of each heaven are innumerable. All the members of one society have some general resemblance, like the facial and other resemblances which we here detect in families and races. They all know and love each other intimately with the tenderest sense of kinship. In the other life, indeed, all who are not in similar and corresponding states of thought and affection are, or become strangers to each other, live in distant societies, or even in other heavens.

For there are more heavens than one. The Greek of the Lord's Prayer should have been translated: "Our Father who art in the heavens." Paul says that he was carried up to the third heaven. Swedenborg affirms that there are three heavens, distinct from each other, one above or within the other, communicating not by spaces or sensible approaches, but only by influx, like that of the soul into the body.

As all external appearances in the spiritual world are due to differences of affection and thought, the division of the entire heaven or Grand Man into three distinct, discrete, spiritual universes, is founded upon a threefold manifestation of the divine love and wisdom through the natural, spiritual and celestial degrees of angelic