In this arrangement of Divine Providence, by which "many mansions" are prepared for his people, the goodness and mercy of the Lord are clearly and beautifully manifested. A home is prepared for every regenerated spirit,—a home precisely suited to his state. He is surrounded by those spirits and those oniy, whose peculiar affections and sympathies, are in perfect harmony with his own. But as before remarked, there are equally good reasons for believing, that hell is also distinguished with societies, corresponding to the states of the spirits who inhabit those regions of woe. The most general distinction is into those kingdoms which are formed by the love of evil and the love of falsity. Depending upon these kingdoms are also those immense societies of unhappy spirits, who delight to be the slaves of those who are under the dominion of these infernal lusts. The general distinctions here indicated, are sufficiently manifest from the ruling loves of those unhappy men who are spending this life, preparing for those regions of wrath and endless woe. There are some whose lives plainly indicate that their peculiar delight is to do evil. There is nothing that they wish more than to draw the unguarded youth into the paths that lead to hell. It is their life's love to do mischief,—to strew their own path through life with the sad wrecks of moral and spiritual desolation. It is often very difficult for minds of a better class, to conceive of any possible motives that could lead to those dark and infernal deeds in which the worst class of men delight. Even such a writer as Dr. Thomas Brown, of the Edinburg University, has somewhere remarked, in refer-
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It is further to be known, that one society is never entirely and absolutely like another, nor one individual in a society like another, but there is an agreeing and harmonizing variety of all, which varieties are so ordered by the Lord, that they tend to one end, which is effected by love and faith towards Him, whence comes union. Hence the heaven and heavenly joy of one person is never entirely and absolutely like that of another, but according to the varieties of love and faith, so also are the heavens and the joy in them."—A. C., n. 684, 686, 690.
