Page:The Other Life.djvu/261

 mountains fell upon the condemned spirits who fled in terror from an exhibition of what they considered "the wrath of God."

These sublime and terrible scenes, which the literalist is vainly expecting to occur in our natural world,, have already taken place four times in the world of spirits, the only possible theatre of judgment.

The first church instituted by God extended from Adam to Noah. Of its peculiarities, its successive changes, and its fate, Swedenborg is the only historian. They are narrated in the spiritual sense of the first ten chapters of Genesis. The perversions of truth and the moral corruptions toward the close of that antediluvian dispensation, must have been terrible indeed; for the judgment executed upon it in the world of spirits is described symbolically as a great flood which destroyed the whole world.

The second church extended from Noah to Abraham. Its judgment is described representatively by the burning of Sodom and Gomorrah. The real cause of that catastrophe and of many others, no doubt, that occurred in the world about that time, was the judgment executed in the world of spirits on the expiring church, and the iuaugura-