sions and rest so contentedly in their false persuasions, that it is hard to convict them of sin at the bar of their own consciences, and to make them sensible of the awful fact, that their affections and thoughts, so far as they are evil and false, are already in hell, and felt and shared by the infernal spirits or the invisible world. The utter incredulity as to the everlasting fire threatened in the literal sense of the Scriptures, and the vague hope that a God of infinite mercy and power will some how or other finally save them from the consequences of sin, have produced a most culpable indifference on the whole subject. There is no point in spiritual philosophy on which the old theology is so dark and unsatisfactory, and which so urgently needs the clear, thorough, convincing and instructive light of a new dispensation of truth.
Great, indeed, are the miseries inflicted by evil spirits upon each other.
"Their highest satisfaction," says Swedenborg, "consists in the ability to punish, torture and torment one another, which they effect by artifices entirely unknown in the world, exciting exquisitely painful, and, as it were, corporeal sensations, and also dire and horrible fantasies, as well as extreme alarm and terror, with many other torments. In
