238 HEAVEN and HELL §416
It may be seen above (§§ 329 – 345 ) that every child—wherever born,
whether within the church or outside it, whether of devout or irreverent
parents—is accepted by the Lord at death. Every child is raised in heaven,
is taught and is permeated with affections for what is good according to
the divine design and thereby with fi rsthand knowledge of things true,
and is then perfected in intelligence and wisdom, so to speak, and admit-
ted into heaven to become an angel. You can gather what a vast multi-
tude of heaven’s angels has come from this source alone from the
beginning of creation to the present day.417 The vastness of the Lord’s heaven also follows from the fact that all the
planets we can see in our solar system are earths, and especially that there
are untold more in the universe, all inhabited, as discussed in a special book-
let titled [Other] Planets, from which I should like to cite the following.
[ 2 ] It is common knowledge in the other life that there are many
planets with people on them and therefore angels and spirits from
them, since anyone who wants to talk with spirits from other planets
because of a love of the truth and a desire to be useful is allowed to do
so to be convinced of the plurality of worlds, to learn that the human
race is not just from one earth but from countless planets.
[ 3 ] I have talked about this on occasion with spirits from our earth,
noting that intellectually gifted people could know, on the basis of
much that is familiar to them, that there are many earths with people
on them. That is, they could come to the rational conclusion that
masses as big as the planets, some of which are larger than our earth,
are not empty lumps created only to meander around the sun and radi-
ate their feeble light for just one planet, but that their function must be
more worthwhile than this.
People who believe (as they should) that the Divine created the
universe for the sole purpose of the emergence of the human race and a
heaven from it (for the human race is the seedbed of heaven) cannot
help but believe that there are people wherever there is a planet.
It is abundantly clear that the planets visible to our eyes, the ones
in our solar system, are earths, because they are material bodies, since
they refl ect the sun’s light; and when we look at them through a tele-
scope they do not look like ruddy, fi ery stars but like earths with blurry
bands of color. There is also the fact that they are borne around the
sun, through the stations of the Zodiac, just like our earth, which must
cause years and the seasons of the year called spring, summer, fall, and
winter. Similarly, they rotate on their axes like our earth, which makes