Page:Heaven Revealed.djvu/310

If such be the effects of youthful love here on earth in its first warmth and freshness, it is easy to believe that conjugial love in heaven, which is so much purer, deeper and stronger, is the parent and source of all other heavenly loves; and that into this love, as Swedenborg assures us, are gathered "all joys and all delights from first to last."

Then, to think of this love with angelic consorts as not only continuing forever, but growing stronger and purer and more delightful with every fresh accession of wisdom, and this through endless ages! And this, too, we can easily believe when we consider the origin and correspondence and spiritual nature of this love. And with equal readiness does the rational mind accept as true the following relation which Swedenborg says he received from a married couple who had been for ages in heaven, and from whom "there breathed forth a vernal warmth with a sweet-smelling odor as from the earliest flowers in gardens and fields."

"We have been consorts," said they, "now for ages, and continually in the flower of age in which you see us. Our first state was as the state of a virgin and young man when they unite themselves by marriage. And we then believed that that state was the very blessedness of our life. But we heard from others in our heaven, and afterwards we ourselves perceived, that that state was one of heat not tempered with light, and that it is successively tempered as the husband is perfected in wisdom and the wife loves that wisdom in the husband; and that this is done by means of uses, and according to those which each by mutual aid renders in society; also that delights succeed according to the degree of light and heat, or of wisdom and its love. . .