§386 marriage 221
brief—that expressed my sentiments fully. He said that during his physi-
cal life he had thought nothing of acts of adultery.
It occurred to me to tell him, though, that acts of adultery are
unspeakable, no matter how different and even permissible they may
look to people like him because of the pleasure they are grasping and
their consequent rationalizations. He might realize this simply because
marriages are the seedbed of the human race and therefore the seedbed of
the kingdom of heaven. Because of this, they should never be violated
but should be regarded as holy. He might also realize this because he
must know that he was now in the other life and in a state to perceive
that marriage love was coming down from the Lord through heaven, and
that mutual love, the foundation of heaven, was derived from that love as
from a parent. There was also the fact that when adulterers merely
approach heavenly communities they become aware of their own stench
and dive down toward hell. He should at least know that violation of
marriage is against divine laws and against the civil laws of all kingdoms
as well as contrary to genuine rational light because, among many other
things, it is contrary to both divine and human order.
However, he answered that he had not thought that way during his
physical life. He wanted to quibble about whether this was true or not;
but he was told that there is no quibbling about the truth. Quibbling
favors whatever pleases us, and therefore supports what is evil and false.
He should fi rst think about what he had been told, because it was true.
Or again, he could start from the principle widely acknowledged in the
world that we should not do anything to others that we do not want
them to do to us. So if anyone had practiced this kind of deception on
his own wife, whom he loved (as is the case in the early stages of every
marriage), then when he was at the peak of his blazing rage about it and
gave voice to his feelings, wouldn’t he himself hold adultery to be detest-
able and, being intellectually gifted, wouldn’t he of all people defend his
condemnation to the point of damning adultery to hell?
I have been shown how the pleasures of marriage love lead to heaven 386
and how the pleasures of adultery lead to hell. The path of marriage love
toward heaven led into constantly increasing blessings and delights until
they were beyond number or description. The deeper they were, the
more of them there were and the more indescribable they were, all the
way to the delights of the inmost heaven, the heaven of innocence. All
this was accomplished with the greatest freedom, because all freedom
stems from love; so the greatest freedom comes from marriage love,
which is the essential heavenly love.