115. 1. Redemption was actually a matter of gaining control of the hells, restructuring the heavens, and by so doing preparing for a new spiritual church. I can say with absolute certainty that these three actions are redemption, because the Lord is bringing about redemption again today. This new redemption began in the year 1757 along with a Last Judgment that happened at that time. The redemption has continued from then until now. The reason is that today is the Second Coming of the Lord. A new church is being instituted that could not have been instituted unless first the hells were brought under control and the heavens were restructured.

Because I have been allowed to see it all I could describe how the hells were brought under control and how the new heaven was built and put into the divine design, but that would be the subject of a whole work. In a little work published in London in 1758 I did lay out how the Last Judgment was carried out.

Gaining control over the hells, restructuring the heavens, and establishing a new church was redemption because without those actions no human being could have been saved. In fact, they follow in a sequence. The hells had to be controlled first before a new angelic heaven could be formed, and that heaven had to be formed before the new church on earth could be instituted, because people in the world are so closely connected to angels from heaven and spirits from hell that at the level of the inner mind they are one. This point will be taken up in the last chapter of this book, which specifically covers the close of the age, the Coming of the Lord, and the New Church [753-791].

617. People who believe that regeneration can exist in the absence of free choice in spiritual matters, that is, without any cooperation on their part, become as cold as a stone toward all the true teachings of the church. If they are warm, they are warm with cravings that are like pitch and tar burning in a torch lit from the fireplace.

They are like people who live in a mansion that has sunk into the ground all the way up to its roof and is flooded with muddy water; so they live on the bare roof and make themselves a rough shelter on it out of swamp reeds. In time, though, even the roof goes under and they are swallowed up.

They are also like a ship that contains precious cargo of all kinds taken from the treasury of the Word, but that cargo is either eaten away by rats and moths or thrown into the sea by the sailors, robbing the merchants of their goods.

The learned professors who are steeped in the mysteries of that faith are like shopkeepers in stalls who sell statues of idols, fruit and flowers made out of wax, seashells, snakes in glass bottles, and other merchandise of that sort.

People who do not even try to look upward because they have been told that the Lord has not granted human beings any spiritual ability, are, in regard to their actions, like animals that keep their heads down and stay in the forests looking for food. If they stumble upon orchards, they are like caterpillars that consume the leaves of the trees. If they happen to lay their eyes on pieces of fruit, and even more so if they lay their hands on them, they fill the fruit with worm-laden [eggs]. Eventually they become like snakes with scales - like those scales, their mistaken ideas rattle and shine. And so on.