Thus it was that the rich man saw Lazarus "afar off" in Abraham's bosom—that is, in a state of love to God and the neighbor incomprehensible to himself. This total difference of state is the "impassable gulf" which is fixed between heaven and hell—no material abyss, but a dissimilarity of mental states which produces entirely different worlds around them. Thus the angels and the devils are antipodal, standing feet to feet, each utterly and for ever beyond the horizon of the other, because their states of thought and feeling are fundamentally and eternally opposite.
Persons or societies in the spiritual world are more or less remote from each other according to the dissimilarity of their mental states. They approach or recede as these states vary and become more or less sympathetic. Husband and wife, being thoroughly united in spirit, occupy the same house and the same chamber. The spirit next resident to yourself will be the one more thoroughly congenial, and so on in all directions from yourself as a centre.
Swedenborg says:
"It has been permitted me to see how similitude of state conjoins, and thereby contracts the extension of space or distance, and how dissimilitude
