selfish affections, lead the man to love his wife, his child, or his brother, because they are his own, while heavenly affections lead him to love them as objects of usefulness, for whose temporal and eternal welfare it is his delight to labor; but to seek to bind them to himself, in the strong bonds of spiritual sympathy, only so far as he sees in them those things which are good and true. With these opposite affections,—the spiritual, ruling and predominant, the natural, still struggling to regain its lost power, but losing strength every hour, in the unequal contest,—the man enters the spiritual world. On the other hand, the man whose inmost and ruling affections are selfish, and who is voluntarily and continually descending towards the regions of death and woe, also leaves the natural world before he becomes fully confirmed in the love of evil. The voice of conscience, seeking to arrest him in his downward course, though every day becoming fainter and feebler, has not yet been hushed in the stillness of spiritual death. His evil affections are sometimes arrested, at least for a moment, when those who love him, surround him with the influences of goodness and truth, and seek to draw him into the path which leads to heaven. And though he cares nothing for spiritual things, in their more internal forms, yet there are some remains of external affections for the civil and moral virtues. For the evil affection, which rules within, has not yet fully consummated the work of spiritual desolation and ruin. And in this state he, also, casts off the natural body and enters the spiritual world.
Now here are two classes of men, who, when entering the spiritual world, are rapidly verging towards opposite spiritual states. But neither have yet reached their eternal abode. Those who are in the love of goodness and truth, have not yet ceased to be disturbed by the opposing influences of evil and falsity; while those who are habitually ruled by the love of self, have not entirely ceased to feel the occasional influence of better motives. And as most men,
