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:

874. This describes the first state following temptation in the regeneration of the member of this Church, a state common to all who are being regenerated. It is a state when people imagine that they themselves are the source of the good they do and of the truth they think. And because they are still in the greatest obscurity, the Lord lets them cling to that opinion. But as long as they cling to that opinion which is false, no good deed they do nor any truth they think is the good or truth of faith. For whatever a person carries out from himself cannot be good since it has come from self, an impure and most unclean origin. From that impure and most unclean origin no good can possibly emerge, for the individual is thinking all the time about his own merit and righteousness. Some go even further, and look down on everybody else, as the Lord teaches in Luke 18:9-14. And others' attitudes are different again. People's selfish desires intermingle in such a way that the outside may look good while the inside is filthy. The good therefore that a person does in this state is not the good of faith. And the same applies to the truth he thinks. What he thinks may be the perfect truth; but as long as the proprium is the source of it, though it is in itself the truth of faith, he does not have the good of faith within him. To be the truth of faith all truth must include from the Lord the good of faith. Only then do they become good and truth.