the Christian world
bring with them this belief that they can be saved by mercy apart
from means, and pray for that mercy; but when examined they are found
to believe that entering heaven is merely gaining admission, and that
those who are let in are in heavenly joy. They are wholly ignorant of
what heaven is and what heavenly joy is, and consequently are told
that the Lord denies heaven to no one, and that they can be admitted
and can stay there if they desire it. Those who so desired were
admitted; but as soon as they reached the first threshold they were
seized with such anguish of heart from a draught of heavenly heat,
which is the love in which angels are, and from an inflow of heavenly
light, which is Divine truth, that they felt in themselves infernal
torment instead of heavenly joy, and struck with dismay they cast
themselves down headlong. Thus they were taught by living experience
that it is impossible to grant heaven to any one from mercy apart
from means.

526. I have occasionally talked with angels about this, and have told
them that most of those in the world who live in evil, when they talk
with others about heaven and eternal life, express no other idea than
that entering heaven is merely being admitted from mercy alone. And
this is believed by those especially who make faith the only medium
of salvation. For such from the principles of their religion have no
regard to the life and the deeds of love that make life, and thus to
none of the other means by which the Lord implants heaven in man and
renders him receptive of heavenly joy; and as they thus reject every
actual mediation they conclude, as a necessary consequence of the
principle, that man enters heaven from mercy alone, to which mercy
God the Father is believed to be moved by the intercession of the
Son. [2] To all this the angels said that they knew such a tenet
follows of necessity from the assumption that man is saved by faith
alone, and since that tenet is the head of all the rest, and since
into it, because it is not true, no light from heaven can flow, this
is the source of the ignorance that prevails in the church at this
day in regard to the Lord, heaven, the life after death, heavenly
joy, the essence of love and charity, and in general, in regard to
good and its conjunction with truth, consequently in regard to the
life of man, whence it is and what it is; when it should be known
that thought never constitutes any one's life, but th