Page:The Other Life.djvu/212

 state of thought which corresponds with their own emotional life (and they cannot rest permanently in any other), they forget everything they had seen or heard, and regard the wisdom of heaven with intense aversion.

What bodies have they? The spiritual body being the effigy of the soul, that which effigies a hateful and false nature must necessarily be hideous and ugly. The devils are therefore deformed and monstrous, fierce and cruel in aspect, hairy, black, filthy, a horrible mixture of man and beast. Their faces are sometimes lurid, sometimes like those of corpses, always fearful and disgusting. The sound of their voice is harsh and grating; the tones full of subtlety, malice, hatred and revenge. The stench that exhales from them is intolerable, differing with every society and every individual. All these external horrors are in strict correspondence with their interior states.

Yet such is the infinite self-conceit and delirious intellectual fantasies of these unhappy creatures, that they seem to each other to be men and women, wise and accomplished and enjoying a fair share of personal attractions! "This is of the Lord's mercy," says Swedenborg, "lest they should seem