Page:The Other Life.djvu/259

 violently against the antipodal or antagonistic society in heaven, so as to break the equilibrium or orderly arrangement which secures the peace of the angels and the free-agency of men, it is reduced and held within bounds by a special descent or visitation of the divine truth. This is the principle involved in the general judgments now to be described. They are visitations of the angels descending into the world of spirits with the Divine Sphere or Truth acting through them. They come to separate the evil from the good, to select the wheat from the tares, to break up and disperse the congregated powers of evil and falsehood, and to let in a new and blessed light from heaven.

Under the past dispensations and for reasons too abstruse to be detailed in this place, the Lord permitted the spirits who were in mixed states of good and evil, and especially those who had been in possession of the divine truths of the church, but had not lived a life according to them, to remain for many centuries in the world of spirits. They framed governments ecclesiastical and civil for themselves; and so infatuated were they with their own supposed goodness and wisdom, that they called their spiritual surroundings heaven. This was the heaven that fled away or departed like a