hand the homes of the good, and on the other, the miserable abodes of those who are confirmed evil. I have thought best to treat of these opposite states in connection, rather than separately, in order that the nature of each may be more distinctly seen, by contrasting it with the other.
A common impression in regard to heaven and hell, appears to be, that they are places to which good and evil spirits go,—that those who obtain the pardon of their sins, by exercising faith in the atoning blood of Christ, will, by the divine mercy, be admitted into heaven, and that their eternal happiness is thereby secured; while those die without having exercised this faith in Christ, will be driven down to hell, there to suffer eternally beneath the wrath of an offended God.
With such sentiments the doctrines of the New Church have no sympathy. Heaven and hell are states, not places. They are neither here nor there, but "within you," as the Lord says of the kingdom of God. If they were places they would necessarily be in the natural world, for place cannot be predicated of spiritual things. You cannot assign to the spirit of man, or to any of those things which are essentialy connected with it, any definite locality. It is true that so long as the spirit remains in the natural world it is intimately connected with the body, and that has always a definite location in space. And hence we say of the man that he is here or there. But in strict truth the locality is predicable of the body and not of the spirit. The correctness of this proposition will be more clearly seen if we reflect that whatever can be located in any definite place, may also be measured. But you would instantly see the absurdity of attempting to determine the size of a man's spirit in feet and inches. You would scarcely think of applying the rules of geometry to the measurement of a man's soul; and would find very little use for algebraical formulæ in assertaining the depth of his affections, or the extent of his understanding. These are spiritual things
