ess spirits or airy
entities or clouds, as do some of the erudite?
8. Papists believe that their saints are human beings in heaven and
others elsewhere are; so do Mohammedans of their dead; more than others
Africans do, and many other peoples do. Why then do not Reformed
Christians believe it, who know it from the Word?
9. Moreover, as a result of the recognition implanted in everyone, some
men aspire to the immortality of renown. The recognition is given that
turn in them and makes heroes and brave men of them in war.
10. Inquiry was made in the spiritual world whether this knowledge is
implanted in all men; it was found that it is in a spiritual idea
attached to their internal thought, not in a natural idea attached to
their external thought.

It is plain from all this that doubt should not be thrown on the Lord's
divine providence on the supposition that only now has it been disclosed
that the human being continues such after death. It is only the sensuous
in man that wants to see and touch what is to be credited. One who does
not raise his thinking above it is in the dark of night about the state
of his own life.

XIV. EVILS ARE TOLERATED IN VIEW OF THE END, WHICH IS SALVATION

275. If man were born into the love for which he was created, he would
not be in evil, in fact would not know what evil is. For one who has not
been in evil and is not in it, cannot know what it is; told that this or
that is evil, he would not believe it. This is the state of innocence in
which Adam and his wife Eve were; that state was signified by the
nakedness of which they were not ashamed; the knowledge of evil
subsequent to the fall is meant by eating of the tree of the knowledge of
good and evil. The love for which the human being was created is love to
the neighbor, to wish him as well as one does oneself and even better. He
is in the enjoyment of this love when he serves his neighbor quite as
parents do their children. This is truly human love, for in it is what is
spiritual, distinguishing it from the natural love of brute animals. Were
man born into this love, he would not be born into the darkness of
ignorance as everyone is now, but into some light of the knowledge and
hence of the intelligence soon to be his. To be sure, he would creep on
all fours at first but come erect on his feet by an implanted striving.
However much he might resemble a quadruped, he would not face down to the
ground but forward to heaven and come erect