Page:The Other Life.djvu/171

 fested himself in person to me, his servant, in the year 1743; when he opened my sight to the view of the spiritual world, and granted me the privilege of conversing with spirits and angels, which I enjoy to this day."

In the other life it is spiritual affinity, nearness, likeness, sympathy which determine presence. The Lord is omnipresent, but He is most nearly and distinctly and sweetly present to those who love Him most and thence know Him best.

The angels who understand intuitively the relation between the subjective and objective in the other life, and who see in everything some manifestation of the Divine, do not mistake the appearance of the Lord in their apparent spaces and times for a form possessing any fixedness or real externeity. They know it to be a heavenly vision, varying in power, beauty and glory according to their own interior states.

The following elucidative paragraph from Swedenborg is very interesting:

"When the Lord appears in heaven, which often occurs, He does not appear clothed with the sun, but in an angelic form, distinguished from the angels by the Divine which is translucent in his face. For the Lord is not there in person, be-