Page:The Swedenborg Library Vol 2.djvu/24

 heaven, those who lived in the world in heavenly love and faith; in hell, those who lived in infernal love and faith; and that hell in the whole complex is what is called the devil and satan.

The angels further said that the Christian world had conceived such an idea respecting the inhabitants of heaven and hell from certain passages of the Word, understood merely according to the sense of the letter and not illustrated by genuine doctrine from the Word; when yet the literal sense of the Word not illustrated by genuine doctrine, perplexes the mind in regard to many things,—whence come ignorance, heresies and errors.

Another reason why the man of the church so believes is, that he supposes no one can go to heaven or hell before the time of the last judgment, when—agreeable to the conception he has formed of that event—all visible things are to perish and new ones to be created, and the soul then to return into its body, and man again to live as a man by virtue of that reunion. This belief involves the other, that angels were created such from the beginning; for it cannot be believed that heaven and hell are from the human race, while it is imagined that no man can enter either until the end of the world.

That heaven is from the human race may be further evident from this, that angelic minds and human minds are similar. Both enjoy the faculty of understanding, perceiving and willing. Both are formed to receive