ings. And the nearer men approach to this state, or to the quality of angelic life as disclosed by Swedenborg—the more faithfully they obey all the revealed laws of the higher or regenerate life—the more pure, serene and exalted is their happiness. This has been the universal experience of mankind in all ages.
But Swedenborg does not teach that the happiness of heaven in all its fullness, can ever be enjoyed on earth. We must lay aside the material body before we can arrive at the perfection of that state denoted by the term heaven. The blessedness experienced here on earth resulting from strict conformity to the highest laws, or from the highest spiritual state to which we are capable of attaining here, is obscure and meagre when compared with that which regenerate souls will enjoy in the world beyond. Accordingly Swedenborg says:
"The man who is in the loves of self and the world, so long as he lives in the body feels delight from these loves, and also in each of the pleasures to which they give birth. But the man who is in love to God and the neighbor, does not, so long as he lives in the body, feel a manifest delight from these loves and from the good affections thence derived, but only a blessedness almost imperceptible, because it is stored up in his interiors, and veiled by the exteriors which are of the body, and blunted by worldly cares.
"But the states are entirely changed after death. The delights of the love of self and the world are then turned into painful and horrible sensations, which are called hell-fire, and occasionally into things defiled and filthy corresponding to their unclean pleasures which—strange to say—are then delightful to them. But the obscure delight and almost imperceptible blessedness which had