world attains its unity, namely, by conforming itself to a system of spiritual perfection, according to the laws of this sense of morality, which would constitute its mode of cohesion. If we grant to these thoughts so much probability as to make it worth while to measure them by their consequences, we shall be drawn by their charm, perhaps unconsciously, into being partial to them. For in this case there seem to disappear most of the irregularities which otherwise, owing to the contradiction between the moral and physical relations of men here on earth, strike us as being so strange. The moral quality of our actions can, according to the order of nature, never be fully worked out in the bodily life of men, but it can be so worked out in the spirit-world, according to spiritual laws.[1] The true purposes, the secret motives of many endeavours, fruitless by impotency, the victory over self, or the occasional hidden treachery in apparently good actions, are mostly lost as to their physical effect in the bodily state, but in the immaterial world they would have to be regarded as fruitful causes, and, consequently, according to spiritual laws and on account of the connection between the individual will and the will of all, they would mutually produce and receive effects appropriate to the moral quality of free will. For just because the morality of an action concerns the inner state of the spirit, it naturally can only in the immediate communion of spirits have an effect adequate to its full morality. Thus it would happen that man's soul would already in this life have to take its place among the
- ↑ 28 (p. 65).—"When the first state after death is passed through, which is the slate of the exteriors, the man-spirit is let into the state of his interiors, or into the state of his interior will and its thought, in which ho had been in the world when left to himself to think freely and without restraint. Into this state he glides without being aware of it, in like manner as in the world, when he withdraws the thought which is nearest to the speech, or from which the speech is, towards his interior thought, and abides in that. When, therefore, the man-spirit is in this state, he is in himself and in his own very life; for to think freely from his own affection is the very life of man, and is himself.
"The spirit in this state thinks from his own very will, thus from his own very affection, or from his own very love; and in this case the thought makes one with the will, and one in such a manner that it scarcely appears that the spirit thinks, but that he wills. The case is nearly similar when he speaks yet with this difference, that he speaks with some degree of fear lest the thoughts of the will should go forth naked, since by civil life in the world this habit also had become of his will."—H. H., 502, 503.
