4574. About the hells of the inwardly deceitful and outwardly good

The Tongue

There are those who had outwardly appeared good, gentle, and dutiful in the world, but whose pleasure, which they had concealed within, had been inflicting harm on the neighbor in every possible way. Such people, like (Losche Bryggaren emot mig boende) ¹ , are not recognized by others. In the other life they also hold themselves aloft for a long time because outwardly they had been gentle and good. They did this among the simple that do not go into higher matters. Those outwardly good elevate themselves by the path toward the right where those are who were of the same nature. But they want others, especially those who are of such a nature, to harm other people. They sit there on the right at the side and are delighted by such things.

Spirits of this kind, let into a hell there, were engulfed by a cloud, some cast headlong into it, and this again and again, always followed by others. They are wicked demons. Those elevated by the former ones are of that nature. When thinking about matters of faith, because they had thought and believed something such, they force others, on whom they are acting, to put their tongue between their teeth, so that they will bite it and cut it off. It has been granted me to experience their attempt [to do] this many, many times so that I would know what they are like. They would have been happy if they had been able to utterly destroy me, for without a tongue I would be deprived of the ability to eat and also to speak, thus to associate with people. This is why their greatest passion is the passion for such things, and why their enjoyment increases in proportion to the magnitude of the harm. For two days now I have seen many thousands swallowed down into their new hell.

Poznámky pod čarou:

3145. 'And he ungirded the camels' means freedom for the things that were to be subservient. This is clear from the meaning of 'ungirding' as freeing, and from the meaning of 'the camels' as general facts, and so things that were to be subservient, as dealt with just above in 3143. The situation is that without freedom no production of truth ever takes place in the natural man, nor summoning of it from there into the rational man, where it becomes joined to good. It is in a state of freedom that all these things come about, for it is the affection for truth springing from good that sets them free. Unless truth is learned with an affection for it, and so in freedom, it is not even implanted in the mind, let alone raised up towards the interior parts of the mind to become faith there. For all reformation is effected in freedom; all freedom goes together with affection, and the Lord keeps man in freedom so that he can - as if of himself and from what is his own - have an affection for what is true and good and so be regenerated, see 2870-2893. These are the things meant by 'he ungirded the camels'; and unless those things were meant, the details recorded here would have been too trivial to mention.