tian Religion n. 531, Doctrine of Life n. 8, and other places, where the same doctrine is plainly taught.)
The above quotations and references (and many similar ones might be made), leave us in no doubt as to what the doctrine revealed for the New Church on this subject, is. I have quoted freely, that the reader may see how explicit and uniform and positive Swedenborg is in his teaching concerning the impossibility of any essential change of character taking place in the other world. The time in, which the several works here quoted were written, stretches over a period of more than twenty years; yet the essential fact stated is always the same. There is not a single point of doctrine on which he has been more explicit or more positive.
Nor does he proclaim the endless duration of the hells as his belief or opinion merely, but as a part of the revelation which he was divinely commissioned to make. And not only does he declare the fact over and over again, and without any essential variation throughout the long period of his illumination, but he tells us that this is what the angels believe and teach on the subject, and is what is meant by the passage in the Word which speaks of a gulf that cannot be passed over after death. And not only so, but he assures us that he saw and conversed with persons known to him from history, who had been dead, some of them seventeen hundred years, and some for ages, and whose characters had not essentially changed since that period. And elsewhere he tells us
