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their belief, they have been taken up into heaven. But when they came there, because their interior life was opposite to that of the angels, they grew blind as to their intellectual faculties till they became like idiots, and were tortured as to their will faculties so that they behaved like madmen. In a word, they who go to heaven after living wicked lives, gasp there for breath, and writhe about like fishes taken from the water into the air, and like animals in the ether of an air-pump after the air has been exhausted. Hence it is evident that heaven is not without one, but within him."—H. H, n. 54. See also n. 400, 518, 525.

Look, now, at the practical tendency of this new doctrine. Accept it as true, then farewell to all reliance on the efficacy of a death-bed repentance. Farewell to the delusive hope of ever reaching heaven through mere belief, or faith alone. The doctrine shows us that no amount of prayers, or tears, or penitent confessions, or pious words uttered on the bed of death or in the felon's cell, can avail to change the ruling love. It reveals the necessity, first, of feeling and acknowledging our utter dependence on the Lord; and second, of yielding a voluntary and implicit obedience to the laws of his kingdom. Thus its tendency is to make people more eager to learn and more careful to obey the revealed laws of the angelic life. Every noble and righteous purpose cherished, every unselfish and brotherly act performed, every self-denying effort put forth in the name of the Lord and in acknowledged dependence on Him for the needed wisdom and strength, is a step on the way to heaven;—something done towards recreating the soul in the Divine likeness, or building it up to "the measure of a man, that is, of the angel."

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