482. The fact that our faith does not stay with us unless it comes from a heavenly 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 fill a book. I can attest to this: that there is no faith whatever and there can be none for people who are engrossed in carnal 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 perceived 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 affection. 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 filled 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, malicious 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.
