why the character cannot be changed after death, as will be shown in a future chapter.
Now no one is under obligation to accept Swedenborg's teaching on this or any other subject. He may accept or reject it as suits his inclination. But I submit that he cannot consistently accept this man as a teacher sent of God—as one divinely illumined and commissioned to make a new revelation—and at the same time discredit or reject such explicit teaching as we find in the foregoing extracts.
Can we suppose the Swedish seer to have been enlightened as no other man ever was upon spiritual subjects generally, yet more in the dark on this one—and by no means an unimportant one, either—than some of us who give no evidence of, and make no pretensions to, any special illumination? There is as little reason for believing him mistaken in regard to the duration of the hells, as there is for believing him mistaken in regard to a hundred other things that he tells us he was commissioned to reveal concerning the great Hereafter.
We cannot, therefore, reject Swedenborg's teaching on this subject, without virtually discrediting his claim as a divinely commissioned messenger, and claiming for ourselves a higher degree of illumination than he enjoyed—upon one subject, at least.
The eternity of the hells, then, is not a human invention. It is not the conclusion of natural reason, nor the offspring of an unenlightened mind. It is a matter of di-
