ircumstance. The wicked go into hell by the necessary and
benignant love of God, not by his indignation; and their
retributions are in their own characters, not in their prison
house. This does not flout and trample all magnanimity, nor shock
the heart of piety; and yet, showing us men compelled to prefer
wallowing in the filth and iniquities of hell, clinging to the
very evils whose pangs transfix them, it gives us the direst of
all the impressions of sin, and beneath the lowest deep of the
popular hell opens to our shuddering conceptions a deep of
loathsomeness immeasurably lower still.

Secondly, the Swedenborgian doctrine of the conditions of
salvation or reprobation, when compared with the popular doctrine,
is marked by striking depth of insight, justice, and liberality.
Every man is free. Every man has power to receive the influx of
truth and good from the Lord and convert it to its blessed and
saving uses, piety towards God, good will towards the neighbor,
and all kinds of right works. Who does this, no matter in what
land or age he lives, becomes an heir of heaven. Who perverts
those Divine gifts to selfishness and unrighteous deeds becomes a
subject of hell. No mere opinion, no mere profession, no mere
ritual services, no mere external obedience, not all these things
together, can save a man, nor their absence condemn him; but the
controlling motive of his life, the central and ruling love which
constitutes the substance of his being, this decides every man's
doom. The view is simple, reasonable, just, necessary. And so is
the doctrine of degrees accompanying it; namely, that there are in
heaven different grades and qualities of exaltation and delight,
and in hell of degradation and woe, for different men according to
their capacities and deserts. A profoundly ethical character
pervades the scheme, and the great stamp of law is over it all.

Thirdly, a manifest advantage of Swedenborg's doctrine over the
popular doctrine is the intimate connection it establishes between
the present and the future, the visible and the invisible, God and
man. Heaven and hell are not distant localities, entrance into
which is to be won or avoided by moral artifices or sacramental
subterfuges, but they are states of being depending on personal
goodness or evil. God is not throned at the heart or on the apex
of the universe, where at some remote epoch we hope to go and see
him, but he is the Life feeding our lives freshly every i