Page:The Swedenborg Library Vol 1.djvu/258

 were brought down nearer to them, by means of which the interiors of those upon whom the judgment was about to come, were disclosed; on which disclosure, they appeared no longer like moral Christians, as before, but like demons; in tumults, and mutual strife about God, the Lord, the Word, faith and the church; and because their inclinations to evil were then let loose, they rejected all these subjects with contempt and ridicule, and rushed into every kind of enormity.

Thus the state of those heavenly inhabitants was changed. Then at the same time all their splendid appearances which they had made for themselves by arts unknown in the world, vanished away; their palaces were turned into vile huts; their gardens into stagnant pools; their temples into heaps of rubbish; and the very hills they inhabited into mounds of gravel, and into other similar things which corresponded to their depraved inclinations and lusts. For all the visible things of the spiritual world are the correspondences of the affections of spirits and angels. These were the signs of the coming judgment.

As the disclosure of their interiors increased, so the order among the inhabitants was changed and inverted. Those who were most powerful in reasonings against the holy things of the church, rushed into the middle and assumed the control. And the rest who were less able in reasonings, receded to the