composition, he is most respectfully requested to contrast its sentiments with those contained in the following passages, taken from a little book entitled "The New Jerusalem, and its Heavenly Doctrine," by Emanuel Swedenborg:
"Man is so created, that as to his internal he cannot die, for he is capable of believing in God, and also of loving God, and thus of being conjoined to God by faith and love; and to be conjoined to God is to live to eternity.
"This internal is with every man who is born; his external is that by means of which he brings into effect the things which are of faith and love. The internal is what is called the spirit, and the external is what is called the body. The external, which is called the body, is accommodated to uses in the natural world; this is rejected when man dies; but the internal, which is called the spirit, is accommodated to uses in the spiritual world; this does not die. The internal is then a good spirit and an angel, if the man had been good when in the world, but an evil spirit, if the man had been evil when in the world.
"The spirit of man, after the death of the body, appears in the spiritual world in a human form, altogether as in the world; he enjoys also the faculty of seeing, of hearing, of speaking, of feeling, as in the world; and he is endowed with every faculty of thinking, of willing, and of acting as in the world. In a word, he is a man as to all things and every particular, except that he is not encompassed with that gross body which he had in the world; he leaves that when he dies, nor does he ever re-assume it.
"This continuation of life is what is understood by the resurrection. The reason why men believe that they are not to rise again before the last judgment, when also every visible object of the world is to perish, is because they have not understood the Word; and because sensual men place their life in the body, and believe that unless this were to live again, it would be all over with the man.
