nstant.
The spiritual world, with all its hosts, sustains and arches,
fills and envelops us. Death is the dropping of the outer body,
the lifting of an opaque veil, and we are among the spirits,
unchanged, as we were before. Judgment is not a tribunal dawning
on the close of the world's weary centuries, but the momentary
assimilation of a celestial or an infernal love leading to states
and acts, rewards and retributions, corresponding. Before this
view the dead universe becomes a live transparency overwritten
with the will, tremulous with the breath, and irradiate with the
illumination of God.

We cannot but regret that the Swedenborgian view of the future
life should be burdened and darkened with the terrible error of
the dogma of eternal damnation, spreading over the state of all
the subjects of the hells the pall of immitigable hopelessness,
denying that they can ever make the slightest ameliorating
progress. We have never been able to see force enough in any of
the arguments or assertions advanced in support of this tremendous
horror to warrant the least hesitation in rejecting it. For
ourselves, we must regard it as incredible, and think that God
cannot permit it. Instruction, reformation, progress, are the
final aims of punishment. Aspiration is the concomitant of
consciousness, and the authentic voice of God. Surely, sooner or
later, in the boonful eternities of being, every creature capable
of intelligence, allied to the moral law, drawing life from the
Infinite, must begin to travel the ascending path of virtue and
blessedness, and never retrograde again.

Neither can we admit in general the claim made by Swedenborg and
by his disciples that the way in which he arrived at his system of
theology elevates it to the rank of a Divine revelation. It is
asserted that God opened his interior vision, so that he saw what
had hitherto been concealed from the eyes of men in the flesh,
namely, the inhabitants, laws, contents, and experiences of the
spiritual world, and thus that his statements are not speculations
or arguments, but records of unerring knowledge, his descriptions
not fanciful pictures of the imagination, but literal transcripts
of the truth he saw. This, in view of the great range of known
experience, is not intrinsically probable, and we have seen no
proof of it. Judging from what we know of psychological and
religious history, it is far more likely that a man should
confound his intangible reveries w