ng subjects who would
receive the divine more intimately and see and sense it? The divine is of
an inexhaustible glory and would not keep it to itself, nor could. For
love wants to communicate its own to another, indeed to impart all it can
of itself. Must not divine love do this, then, being infinite? Can it
impart and then take away? Would that not be to give what will perish,
what in itself is nothing, coming to nothing when it perishes? What
really _is_ is not in it. But divine love imparts what really _is_ or
what does not cease to be, and this is eternal.

[3] In order that a man may live forever, what is mortal with him is
taken away. This mortal of his is his material body, which is taken away
by its death. His immortal, which is his mind, is thus laid bare and he
becomes a spirit in human form; his mind is this spirit. Ancient sages
and wise men perceived that man's mind cannot die. They asked how the
mind could die when it is capable of wisdom. Few today know the interior
idea they had in this. It was the idea, slipping into their general
perception from heaven, that God is wisdom itself, of which man partakes,
and God is immortal or eternal.

[4] Since it has been granted me to speak with angels, I will say
something from experience. I have spoken with those who lived many ages
ago, with some who lived before the Flood and some who lived after it,
with some who lived at the time of the Lord and with one of His apostles,
and with many who lived in the centuries since. They all seemed like men
of middle age and said that they do not know what death can be unless it
is condemnation. Further, all who have lived well, on coming into heaven,
come into the state of early manhood in the world and continue in it to
eternity, even those who had been old and decrepit in the world. Women,
too, although they had become shrunken and old, return into the bloom and
beauty of their youth.

[5] That man lives after death to eternity is manifest from the Word,
where life in heaven is called eternal life, as in Mt 19:29, 25:46; Mk
10:17; Lu 10:25, 18:30; Jn 3:15, 16, 36, 5:24, 25, 39, 6:27, 40, 68,
12:50; also called simply life (Mt 18:8, 9; Jn 5:40, 20:31). The Lord
also told His disciples,

Because I live, you will live also (Jn 14:19),

and concerning resurrection said that

God is God of the living and not God of the dead, and that they cannot
die any more (Lu 20:38, 36).

[6] Second: _Everyone is created to live for