No: This language, like all of the inspired Word, is the language of correspondence. It contains a spiritual meaning. And in this, which is its true meaning, it expresses the intensity of the Divine Love, and its effect upon the wicked. Those who are in states of opposition to the Lord, change his love in themselves into its opposite; just as the deadly night-shade changes the sweet dews and sunshine into poison. They cannot receive his love as it is, because of their own state. They, feel it as something wrathful, fiery, burning. To them it is as a consuming fire; for they change its nature at the moment of receiving it. In its origin all love is pure and good; for it is all from Him who is Love itself. But its quality or nature is changed in the recipient subjects. (See Swedenborg's Heaven and Hell, n. 569.)
Now there are in general two very different and even opposite kinds of love. There is a love of the Lord and the neighbor, which is good and there is a love of self and the world, which, when it reigns supreme in the heart, is evil, and prompts to all kinds of wickedness. And one or the other of these loves bears rule in every man, spirit, or angel, and constitutes the very fire of his life. Good men and angelic spirits live in the former, and wicked men and evil spirits live in the latter kind of love. There is, therefore, a heavenly and a hellish love; or, speaking in the language of correspondence, there is a heavenly fire and a hell fire—the term fire denoting the love or delight which constitutes the life.
