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bodily organ, acquires strength by habitual exercise, and loses it by long-continued rest. So with the hereditary evils of children in the other world; they remain quiescent, and never become actual sins by being ultimated. And the principal reason is, that they are so wisely governed that their evil proclivities are never aroused. The sphere of love and wisdom by which they are continually encompassed, exerts a restraining influence on their evil tendencies, while it quickens into life and action every innocent affection; and so their hereditary evils are kept in a quiescent state. But in order to convince them what they are by inheritance, and to induce in them a becoming humility, they are at times remitted into their natural proprium, and kept in it until they see and acknowledge their hereditary evil tendencies. Says Swedenborg:

"I have conversed with angels concerning infants, and inquired whether they are free from evils, because they have no actual evil, like adults. But I was told that they are equally in evil,—yea, that they, too, are nothing but evil; but that they, like all the angels, are withheld from evil and held in good by the Lord, yet in such a way that it appears to them as if they were in good of themselves. Lest, therefore, infants who have grown up in heaven should entertain a false opinion of themselves, and imagine that the good which they possess is from themselves and not from the Lord, they are sometimes let into the evils which they have received hereditarily, and are left in them until they know, acknowledge and believe that their good is all from the Lord."—H. H. n. 342.

All, we think, will admit the reasonableness of the great seer's disclosures on the whole subject under con-