2290. People who know nothing about the state of the life after death may think that young children acquire angelic intelligence and wisdom the moment they enter the next life. But I have learned through much experience that this is not so at all. Those who die not long after birth have the minds of young children, almost the same as on earth. Nor is the amount of what they know any greater, for they possess no more than the capacity to know, and from this to have intelligence and from this to be wise. Yet that capacity is more perfect because they are not living in the body but are spirits. That this is the mental condition of young children when they first enter heaven I have not merely been told but have also been shown, for on several occasions, in the Lord's Divine mercy, groups of young children have been sent to me, and I have been allowed to read the Lord's Prayer to them. As I did so I was given to perceive how the angels whose company they were in were instilling into their tender and newly-formed ideas the meaning of the things that are in the Lord's Prayer - filling their ideas with it in the measure that the young children were able to receive it - and after that how the young children were given the capacity to think about things such as these as if from themselves.