§483 our nature after death 285
We can see, then, that people come into heaven who have a heavenly
and spiritual love, and people come into hell who have a materialistic
and worldly love without a heavenly and spiritual one.
The fact that our faith does not stay with us unless it comes from a heav- 482
enly love has been brought home to me by so much experience that if I
were to relate what I have seen and heard about it, it would fi ll a book.
I can attest to this: that there is no faith whatever and there can be none
for people who are engrossed in materialistic and worldly love apart from
heavenly and spiritual love. There is only information, or a secondhand
belief that something is true because it serves their own love. Further, a
number of people who thought they had had faith were introduced to
people of real faith; and once communication was established they per-
ceived that they had no faith at all. They even admitted later that simply
believing the truth or the Word is not faith; but faith is loving what is
true from a heavenly love and intending and doing it from a deep affec-
tion. I was also shown that the secondhand belief they called faith was
only like the light of winter in which everything on earth lies dormant,
bound by the ice and buried in snow because there is no warmth to the
light. As a result, the moment it is touched by rays of heaven’s light,
the light of their secondhand faith is not only extinguished but actually
becomes a dense darkness in which people cannot even see themselves.
At the same time, too, their deeper reaches are so darkened that they
cannot discern anything and ultimately go mad because of their false
convictions.
The result is that all the truths such people have learned from the
Word and from the teaching of the church are taken away from them,
all the things they claimed were part of their faith, and in their place
they are fi lled with everything false that accords with the evil of their life.
They are actually all plunged into their loves and into the false notions
that support them as well. Then, since truths contradict the false, mali-
cious notions they are absorbed in, they hate the truths, turn their backs
on them, and reject them.
I can bear witness from all my experiences of what happens in heaven
and in hell that people who have confessed faith alone as a matter of
doctrine and have engaged in evil as regards their lives are all in hell. I
have seen thousands of them sent there and have described them in the
booklet The Last Judgment and Babylon Destroyed.
The fact that love in action, and therefore our life, is what remains fol- 483
lows logically from what I have presented from experience and what I have
just said about deeds and works. Love in action is the work and the deed.