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Memorable Occurrences in Swedenborg's Writings

This list of Memorable Occurrences in Swedenborg's Writings was originally compiled by W. C. Henderson in 1960 but has since been updated.

From Swedenborg's Works

 

Divine Love and Wisdom #350

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350. Some people must indeed be pardoned for having attributed certain visible phenomena to nature, for the following twofold reason: first, that they have not known anything about the sun of heaven where the Lord is, and the influx from it, nor anything about the spiritual world and its state, nor, indeed, of its presence with mankind. And therefore they could not help but think that anything spiritual was a purer form of something natural; thinking thus that angels existed either in the stratosphere or in the stars; and in regard to the devil, either that it was the evil in mankind, or if the devil actually existed, that he existed either in the air or in the depths of the earth; also that people's souls after death existed either at the center of the earth or in some limbo or other until the Day of Judgment; and other like things which their fancy persuaded them of, owing to their ignorance of the spiritual world and its sun.

[2] The second reason they must be pardoned is that they could not have known how the Divine produces all the phenomena that appear on the earth, where one finds both good things and bad, fearing to confirm the notion in themselves lest they ascribe the bad things as well to God, or lest they form a material concept of God, making God and nature one and so confusing the two.

For these two reasons they must be pardoned who have believed that nature produces the phenomena they see by a power implanted from creation.

[3] However, those who by confirmations on the side of nature have made themselves atheists, cannot be pardoned, because they could have confirmed themselves on the side of the Divine. Ignorance, indeed, excuses, but it does not take away falsity that has been confirmed; for such falsity is bound together with evil, thus with hell. Consequently those same people who have confirmed themselves on the side of nature even to the point of separating the Divine from nature, regard nothing as sinful, because everything sinful is a sin against the Divine, which they have separated and so rejected; and people who in spirit regard nothing as sinful, after death, when they become spirits, rush in bondage to hell into heinous evils in accordance with their lusts, to which they have given free rein.

  
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Many thanks to the General Church of the New Jerusalem, and to Rev. N.B. Rogers, translator, for the permission to use this translation.

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