Page:The Other Life.djvu/248

 isms perish; their own names and history are forgotten as shadows not worth a thought. Their qualities alone survive. From them they love, think, feel, see, live.

When the exterior mind is thus closed in a good spirit, he is led by angels into places of instruction. He is there divested of all his errors of opinion and taught the truths of heaven which he receives with inexpressible delight. Soon he discovers some way or road invisible to others, some way overarched with flowers and fragrant with odors and flagged with precious stones and brilliant with a great light, a way that leads him upward and onward into the heavenly society for which he is now prepared and where he will live for ever.

The interiorly evil spirit, however, does not go to any place of instruction. In his conceit of superior wisdom he refuses it; in his aversion to spiritual truth, he abhors it. The exteriors of the world of spirits disappear also from his vision, and he seeks those whose interior life and loves are similar to his own. He also discovers a road or way invisible to others, but it is a dark cleft between frowning rocks, a downward path, pervaded by horrible stenches and overhung by lurid vapors,