342. I have talked with angels about children, wondering whether they were free from evils because they did not have any realized evil the way adults do. I was told, though, that they are equally involved in evil, even to the point that they too are nothing but evil. ¹ However, they, like all angels, are withheld from their evils by the Lord and kept focused on what is good to the point that it seems to them as though they were focused on what is good of their own accord. So to prevent children from having a false notion about themselves after they have grown up in heaven - a belief that the good that surrounds them is from them and not from the Lord - they are let back into their hereditary evils from time to time and left in them until they know and recognize and believe the way things really are.

[2] There was one individual who had died in infancy and grown up in heaven who had this kind of opinion. He was the son of a particular king; so he was let back into his own innate life of evil. I could tell then from the aura of his life that he had a drive to lord it over others and regarded adultery as of no concern whatever - evils that were part of his heredity from his parents. Once he recognized that he was like this, though, he was again accepted among the angels he had been with before.

[3] In the other life, none of us suffers any punishment for inherited evil, because it is not ours. We are not at fault for our hereditary nature. We suffer punishment for any actualized evil that is ours - that is, for whatever hereditary evil we have claimed as our own by acting it out in our lives.

The reason grown-up children are let back into the state of their hereditary evil is not to punish them. It is to make sure they know that on their own they are nothing but evil and that they are borne from hell into heaven by the Lord's mercy, that they are in heaven not because they deserve it but as a gift from the Lord. This prevents them from inflating themselves over others because of the good that attends them, for this is in opposition to the blessing of mutual love just as it is against the truth of faith.

脚注:

10731. 'Everyone doing work on it shall die' means spiritual death to those who are led by self and selfish loves, and not by the Lord. This is clear from the meaning of '[doing] work on the sabbath day' as being led by self and selfish loves, and not by the Lord, dealt with in 8495, 10360, 10362, 10364; and from the meaning of 'dying' as damnation or spiritual death, dealt with in 6119, 9008. Those led by self and selfish loves do not believe in the Lord, for belief in the Lord consists in being led by Him and not by self. Nor, as a result of this, do they see any value at all in the union of His Human with the Divine itself, nor indeed any value at all in being regenerated by the Lord, nor thus any value in the Church's truths either. For they say to themselves, What are such things? Or, What advantage do we have if we know them, indeed think about them and desire them? Surely we live in the way others do, so what difference does it make? The reason why they think like this is that the life of the world, not the life of heaven, governs their thinking; the life of heaven is something about which they are ignorant and no one's thought can be governed by that of which he is ignorant. People such as these therefore cannot be saved, for they do not have heaven within them and consequently cannot be in heaven; their interiors are not in accord with it. For unless their interiors have been rearranged by the Lord to conform to an image of heaven there can be no joining to heaven. This is what those people are like who refuse to believe in those all-embracing realities. This condition in a person is what is meant by '[doing] work on the sabbath day', and the spiritual death of such is what is meant by their natural death.