Page:The Judgment Day.pdf/151

destroy if possible. Of the truth of this principle, there are sufficient illustrations in the natural world. The mutual hatred that exists among the various societies which are formed by the love of self and the world, may not be half as bitter and malignant as in that world from which it comes, but it is suffiiciently so to illustrate the uniform operation of the principle. Observe, for example, the deadly antagonism which always prevails between infidelity and its adherents, and the disciples of religious bigotry. Though mutually aiding each other in a common warfare against goodness and truth,—the one professing to worship a God who has revealed himself only through the laws of the natural world, the other, a God to whom they have ascribed the passions and affections of unregenerate human nature,—yet each, at the same time, cherishes the most malignant hatred against each other, exceeded only by the hatred which they mutually bear towards the truth itself. There is no reason to suppose that the deadly enmity which is thus cherished, will lose any of its malignity, when those who are the subjects of it, shall have gone to the spiritual world.

In regard to the number and variety of the infernal societies, Swedenborg remarks that,

"They are as many in number as are the angelic societies in the heavens, inasmuch as to every heavenly society an infernal society corresponds as its opposite. That the heavenly societies are innumerable, and all discriminated according to the goods of love, of charity, and of faith, may be seen in the article concerning the societies of which the heavens consist, and in the article concerning the immensity of heaven: the case therefore is the same with the infernal societies, which are discriminated according to the evils opposite to those goods. Every evil is of infinite variety, like every good. That this is the case, cannot be conceived by those who have only a simple idea concerning every evil, as concerning contempt, concerning enmity, concerning hatred, concerning revenge, concerning deceit, and concerning other similar evils: but let them know that every one of these evils contains so many specific differences, and so many differences still more specific or particular, that a volume would not suffice to enumerate them. The hells are so