Page:The Other Life.djvu/190

 same Spirit, dividing to every man severally as he will. For as the body is one and hath many members; and all the members of that one body, being many, are one body; so also is Christ. For by one Spirit are we all baptized into one body, whether we be Jews or Gentiles, whether we be bond or free."

We shall understand more clearly what the occupations of these heavenly spirits are, if we first remove from our mind's eye, as calculated to obscure our perceptions, all those present and earthly engagements, which, by the very constitution of the spiritual world as unfolded by Swedenborg, are unnecessary or impossible in the future life.

The natural world is the sphere of birth and of death. In the spiritual world nothing is born and nothing dies. The natural world is fixed in time and space, not responding or responding very slowly to the spiritual changes of the soul. The spiritual world on the contrary is instantaneously plastic to the motions of the soul, of which its times, spaces and all its objective phenomena are strictly representative. From this philosophical basis there springs up at once a vast difference