William Henry Holcombe

“ The mind of man, unillumined by light from heaven, never could have invented the sublime philosophy by which the Swedish seer has penetrated so far into the mysterious abysses of the universe. The unaided imagination of the natural mind, struggling to frame for itself some idea or visible image of heaven, rushes to the two extremes, materialism and sheer immateriality. Heaven is, from one standpoint, a purely mental state of existence, a negation of everything real; God is a Being without body, parts, or passions; the soul is a formless and intangible ether ”

“ God is the sole life of the universe. He does not create life but gives it. It is uncreated. We live by his life; not by a force, derived perhaps from Him, but now fully our own and independent of Him; but by life from moment to moment flowing from Him and received into our spirit. This is influx. There is not, therefore, one God in heaven and another or a different one in hell; one law in heaven and an opposite in hell; an economy of grace in one and an economy of wrath in the other. The entire universe is held together by one breath, one life, one law. ”

“ As Swedenborg expresses it, they are all given freely by the Lord. Food, clothing, shelter, are no longer objects of painful solicitude. In our Father's house are "many mansions" prepared for us by Himself. We are fed with "angels' food," a spontaneous creation like the manna of the wilderness. We find ourselves daily clothed in correspondence with our interior states, like the lilies of the field which neither toil nor spin. The golden city "garnished with all manner of precious stones," and the river of life "clear as crystal," rise ever before us as in a ravishing and perpetual dream. ”

“ Neither can the new-comer from earth go at once into hell. He bears with him some traces of goodness and truth, some touch of kindness, some remnant of humanity, which would produce similar disorder in the infernal sphere. It would be like the approach of an angel to the hells, when darkness comes over them, and terror seizes them and frightful pains lay hold of them.
The new-comer himself would be more dreadfully tortured by the experiment than either the angels or the devils. ”

“ These changes in the bodily form are symbolical of the affections and thoughts which produce them. What a world of meaning lies in the smile, the frown, the tear, the laugh, and in the numberless gestures of the body! Our perception of these meanings is very obscure and faint; but the celestial angels who can read a man's entire life in the sound of his voice or the shape of his hand, find them a means of perfect communication. The face of nature also is as intelligible to them as the face of man, and through it God speaks to them a language of infinite wisdom and beauty. ”

“ Our question will be readily answered by recalling some of the profound psychological truths which Swedenborg himself has given us.
A man's love is his life. The delight which he feels in the exercise of his loves, is the joy and essence of his life. Thought proceeds from love as surely as light from heat. We have no thoughts which are really our own, and which abide with us, except those which flow from, represent and correspond to our affections. We believe what we love and we love what we believe. To change a man's faith you must change his affections. ”

“ And we, poor denizens of earth, live far below them all! If we turn from the guiding light of revelation and question the cold and beautiful Nature before us about the life after death and the heaven for which we yearn, we are answered only by the blinding glare of the sun, the murmur of the sea, the wail of the wind, the birth and death of the flowers, the shifting colors of the cloud, the blue dome with its unrevealing face and the far-off smile of the silent stars! ”

“ One sun shines upon all alike. The rain descends upon the evil and the good. Daylight and darkness come invariably to half the world at once. The wilderness does not blossom for our prayers; the flowers do not perish at our crimes. Times and spaces, cruel and inexorable as death, stand between us and our hopes, our longings and our loves.
In the spiritual world it is different. That sphere has no externeity independent of the souls inhabiting it. That world is momentarily created by the influx of the divine life through the spirits or angels who live there ”

“ There are spiritual thoughts which have never come within the range of our vision; spiritual harmonies which have never fallen upon our ear. There lies about us, indeed, a vast, invisible, inaudible universe full of spiritual beauty and glory. Our natural eye does not respond to the undulations of its ether; our natural ear does not catch the vibrations of its air. We scarcely credit its existence.
Our spiritual ears, which will be permanently opened at death, may be opened while living, and the voices of angels made audible. ”

“ This hell is the heaven of evil spirits. These direful surroundings to them are beautiful; these horrible associations to them are pleasant; this awful life is the one they have chosen for themselves. They would not, if they could, exchange their lot for the light of heaven and the bowers of bliss. When let alone, when they let others alone, when they are not engaged in torturing each other, they are happy. ”

“ Ask this unthinking Christian who is startled by the assertion that the soul cannot be divested by death of the human form—ask him if Christ did not ascend to heaven with the human body which he exhibited to the doubting apostle? if Enoch and Elijah, did not pass bodily into the spiritual world? if all the spirits and angels seen of the prophets and apostles did not appear in the human shape? if his own idea of the final heaven of the saints is not based upon the resurrection and purification of his own gross natural body? ”

“ Every window is thrown open to greet the spiritual sun which is representative of the Lord. Thousands of beautiful and happy spirits present themselves to view, clad as the angels are, and all voices join in singing a morning song of praise and joy, of such divine harmony that the whole soul is thrilled and melted with delight. This did Swedenborg see and hear.
Yes, music exists in heaven. It is indeed the voice of heaven, because it is the external form or medium through which the purest heavenly affections are expressed and communicated. ”

“ The morning and noon are long and brilliant according as the spirit can sustain its total surrender to God and the neighbor. As the soul turns partially away from the Lord to self, and approaches, though still remotely, those earthly states or modes of feeling and thought which we so well understand, a spiritual obscurity overshadows it, represented outwardly by all the phenomena of evening.
Thus it is that even the angels feel, like ourselves, the tender pensiveness of the twilight hour. The great sun seems to veil himself in a glory of amber clouds. ”

“ The morning hour of the angels is their state of sweetest peace, innocence, trust and joy.
Every morning in the spiritual world is a new birth and resurrection; a passing away of old forms of thought and feeling and a flowering forth of a higher and better state. Every morning is a further revelation of the Lord, and a fresh coronation of love, fragrant with dews and flowers, as the guiding divinity of the soul. ”

“ With the divine sphere, come not only affection and thought, but innocence, peace, joy, strength and power. Every nerve and fibre of the angelic form is perpetually pervaded with a serene delight.
How can we attain this grand ideal of individual and social perfection? We, who bear the mark of the beast on our foreheads and the indenture of hereditary evil in our hearts; we, whose every step and thought and emotion have somewhat in them which is abhorrent to angels and to God; we whose good deeds are selfish, whose very prayers and preachings are tainted with personal aspirations ”

“ Infernal media, organized forms of hatred and falsity, produce hell.
Love is the life of heaven; hatred, the life of hell. The hatred of hell is the outward manifestation of a life which has been changed into its opposite by its passage through an utterly selfish form. The common spirit of all the hells, their connecting bond, is hatred to God and the neighbor. This hatred is the legitimate result of the love of self, when it rises from the place it was designed to occupy—the last and lowest—and absorbs and governs the whole soul. ”

“ On this love of truth for its own sake and on the gradual emancipation of the human heart, by divine influences, from these inferior loves which prevent its discovery, the future progress of the world depends. These are the sturdy workmen who are clearing away the old and tough and unsightly weeds of error from the garden of the human soul, and who will plant in their stead the perennial flowers of beauty and love. ”

“ What are these affections? In the first place, the love of the beautiful. Who does not know the sweet and pleasing sensations which are created in the perceptive faculties by the beauties of nature, by the sight of flower-gardens and green lawns, of the blue mountains in the distance, the far roll of the emerald sea, the golden sky of evening, and the boundless dome of night crowded with its celestial fires? There are similar sensations of delight in the contemplation of great truths. The abstract truths of geometry impart a positive pleasure to many minds. ”

“ He cannot cease to love nor to create. The life, the breath, the power which flow from Him through the universe are one. He cannot divide them, giving a little here and a little there, infusing or withdrawing as He may choose. He gives all to all; the difference in result is not due to partiality of influx, but to differences of reception. He cannot withhold life from one sphere and give it to another. He would then be present in one and not in the other; He would cease to be omnipresent. In fine, God could not destroy hell without at the same moment destroying heaven and earth. ”

“ The new-comer from the earth, expecting to find himself a "disembodied spirit," gazes around in mute astonishment. He questions himself, into what other strange and beautiful physical world, and by what miracle he has been transported. Then some dearly-loved one approaches, some friend long lost, long folded from his vision in the light of heaven, and proceeds to instruct him about the differences between the spiritual and the natural world, which underlie the apparent resemblance, and thus to lift the veil of darkness from his spiritual sight. ”

“ Do not the simple-minded laity, also, unblinded by metaphysical sophistries, think of heaven as the children do, as a world of superlative grandeur and beauty, full of visible and audible and tangible realities, and inhabited by glorious beings in the human form, living in splendid mansions and clad in radiant garments, displaying, also, the tender sympathies of human love and all the noble activities of the human intellect? ”

“ God and the soul will for ever be mysteries. They are only revealed to us through created forms. We know nothing of heat and light but through objects which are heated or luminous. We know nothing of goodness, truth or beauty, but what we learn through those forms or objects which we designate as good, true or beautiful.
Therefore the spiritual world is organic, composed of parts, objects or substances, arranged into series, degrees and systems. It is a genuine world, a universe of itself, a cosmos, far more extensive, perfect and beautiful than this. ”

“ Yes, we must be either one thing or the other, utterly good or utterly evil. Judgment is separation; the separation of good and evil spirits, and the separation of good and evil elements in the individual spirit. No evil passions, no false opinions, no unruly tempers, no frailties, no petty faults, no thorn in the flesh, will cleave to the good man, who has set his face steadfastly toward the great Sun of the spiritual universe. ”

“ The angels have learned that lesson, so hard for the carnal mind to comprehend, that happiness consists in loving and obeying God so supremely, that our selfhood is put in the last and lowest place, and our life is expended upon and for others.
This is to be like God. He did not create the world for the display of His own glory, as some of the old catechisms have it, but to make a universe of wise and happy creatures, and to flood all the spheres of creation with light and peace and beauty and eternal joy. To receive from Him and to give to others is the secret of heavenly happiness. ”