Page:The Other Life.djvu/207

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ated. It is first an organic state of the soul, and then an external place or world produced in correspondence with that state. There are three hells opposite to the three heavens; for the three degrees which exist in the human soul, natural, spiritual and celestial, open after death into the heaven or the hell which man has chosen for himself by his life in the world.

The primal cause of heaven and all its phenomena was shown to be the God-in-the-heart of the angels—that is, the love to God and the charity to the neighbor which engaged and exercised their supreme affections. This is the cause of all their light or wisdom, and of the glorious and beautiful objective world spread out before them, representing in living symbolism the spiritual mysteries of the kingdom of God within them.

It is obedience to the Divine will, making the angel like God, the finite image and likeness of God, which permits the influent life of God to pass forth into such resplendent external forms, and to make the glory and beauty and peace and joy of heaven. Disobedience to the Divine will, unlikeness to God, hideous moral deformity is, on the same principle, the cause of hell. It is a question of media. Angelic media, organized forms of love