Page:Heaven Revealed.djvu/333

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the flow of joyous strength, while it cleaves the air at fullest speed, yet seems as if at rest, poised on its outspread pinions.

"Tor it is to be remembered that the toil that is unfelt is no toil; and the exercise of the mind's faculties on congenial objects, is not only unaccompanied by any irksome sense of toil, but is attended, and probably, were it not for the necessity of using gross material organs, would ever continue to be attended, with positive delight. Fatigue, waste, exhaustion, belong only to matter and material organization. The mind itself does not waste or grow weary, and but for the weight of the weapons wherewith it works, it might think, and imagine, and love on forever. Even with all its present drawbacks, a spirit of great power and energy, so far from resting, frets and feels ill at ease in inactivity. To it inaction is unrest and torture—no work so hard as doing nothing. Only in the putting forth of its energies, in the evolution of its inward power, in the devotion of thought and feeling to congenial pursuits, does it find itself tranquil, unburdened, at rest."—Caird's Sermons, pp. 251, '2.

Swedenborg further tells us that the diligent application of the mind to some useful employment from a principle of neighborly love, is an essential condition of happiness in the realms above; and that no one can have experience of the joys of heaven without such application, since the interiors cannot otherwise be opened to the Divine life, the influx of which is the cause of all true joy. He relates the following as instruction given by the angels themselves to certain novitiates who had recently entered the spiritual world:

"The delight of use arising from love through wisdom, is the life and soul of all heavenly joys. In the heavens there are most joyful consociations, which ex-