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].

678. Not just babies but everyone who is baptized comes into the company of Christians in the spiritual world. This is because in that world peoples and nations are differentiated by their religion. Christians are in the center; Muslims are around them; idolatrous faiths of various kinds are behind them; and Jews are at the sides.

In addition, all the people of a given religion are subdivided into communities there. In heaven they are arranged into separate communities according to specific desires that relate to loving God or loving their neighbor. In hell people are arranged into separate hordes according to specific desires that oppose the two loves just mentioned - therefore, according to specific cravings for evil.

[2] In the spiritual world, by which we mean both heaven and hell, all things have been arranged with great care to preserve distinctions in regard to both the larger aggregate groups and the individual components of those groups. The preservation of the entire universe hinges on this precise arrangement.

This precision would not be possible unless all of us, after we were born, were given some sign that identified which religious community we belonged to.

If there were no way to identify Christians (meaning baptism), some Muslim spirit or some idolatrous spirit would be able to attach to Christians, either when they were newborn or later on in their childhood, inspire them with an interest in Islam or idolatry, and turn them away and alienate them from Christianity, which would subvert and destroy the overall spiritual design.