525. Many people who arrive in the other life from the Christian world bring with them a faith that they are going to be saved out of straight mercy, because they plead for it. When they are examined, though, it turns out that they have believed that getting into heaven was simply a matter of being let in, and that people who had been admitted were in heavenly joy. They have had no notion of what heaven is or what heavenly joy is. So they are told that the Lord does not deny heaven to anyone. They can be let in if they wish and even stay there. Some who wanted to were actually let in; but at the very threshold, at the touch of heaven's warmth (that is, of the love angels are engaged in) and the inflow of heaven's light (which is divine truth), they were seized with such pain in the heart that they felt themselves in the torments of hell rather than in the joys of heaven. Struck by this, they plunged down headlong. In this way they were taught by firsthand experience that no one can enter heaven out of straight mercy.

169. Throughout the created universe, both in its grandest constituents and in its most infinitesimal, we find these three ingredients, namely, end, cause and effect. These three are found in the grandest and most infinitesimal constituents of the universe for the reason that the same three exist in God the Creator, who is the Lord from eternity. However, because He is infinite, and because the infinite elements in an infinite being are, in a distinct combination, one (as demonstrated above in nos. 17-22), therefore in Him these three also, and the three in His infinite elements, are, in a distinct combination, one.

It is in consequence of this that the universe - which was created from His being, and which regarded in terms of its functions is an image of Him - acquired these three ingredients in each and all of its constituents.