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Title: Heaven and its Wonders and Hell

Author: Emanuel Swedenborg

Release Date: December 22, 2005 [EBook #17368]

Language: English

Character set encoding: ASCII

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E-text donated by the Kempton Project, submitted by William Rotella

Heaven and its Wonders and Hell

From Things Heard and Seen

by Emanuel Swedenborg.

Translated by John Ager.

1. The Lord, speaking in the presence of His disciples of the
consummation of the age, which is the final period of the church,{1}
says, near the end of what He foretells about its successive states
in respect to love and faith:{2}

Immediately after the tribulation of those days the sun
shall be darkened, and the moon shall not give her light,
and the stars shall fall from heaven, and the powers of
the heavens shall be shaken. And then shall appear the
sign of the Son of man in heaven; and then shall all the
tribes of the earth mourn; and they shall see the Son of
man coming in the clouds of heaven with power and great
glory. And He shall send forth His angels with a trumpet
and a great sound; and they shall gather together His
elect from the four winds, from the end to end of the
heavens (Matt. 24:29-31).

Those who understood these words according to the sense of the letter
have no other belief than that during that latest period, which is
called the final judgment, all these things are to come to pass just
as they are described in the literal sense, that is, that the sun and
moon will be darkened and the stars will fall from the sky, that the
sign of the Lord will appear in the sky, and He Himself will be seen
in the clouds, attended by angels with trumpets; and furthermore, as
is foretold else where, that the whole visible universe will be
destroyed, and afterwards a new heaven with a new earth will come
into being. Such is the opinion of most men in the church at the
present day. But those who so believe are ignorant of the arcana that
lie hid in every particular of the Word. For in e