And it was after this that Jesus met the father whose son was
possessed with a dumb spirit and who cried out to him, "Lord, I believe;
help thou mine unbelief" (Mark ix.).
Those three apostles did not understand what this rising from the dead
meant. Neither did those Sadducees who asked the Master whose wife she
should be in the resurrection who in this life had had seven husbands
(Matt. xxii.); and it was then that Jesus said that God is not the God
of the dead, but of the living. And the other life is not, in fact,
thinkable to us except under the same forms as those of this earthly and
transitory life. Nor is the mystery at all clarified by that metaphor of
the grain and the wheat that it bears, with which Paul answers the
question, "How are the dead raised up, and with what body do they come?"
(1 Cor. xv. 35).
How can a human soul live and enjoy God eternally without losing its
individual personality--that is to say, without losing itself? What is
it to enjoy God? What is eternity as opposed to time? Does the soul
change or does it not change in the other life? If it does not change,
how does it live? And if it changes, how does it preserve its
individuality through so vast a period of time? For though the other
life may exclude space, it cannot exclude time, as Cournot observes in
the work quoted above.
If there is life in heaven there is change. Swedenborg remarked that the
angels change, because the delight of the celestial life would gradually
lose its value if they always enjoyed it in its fullness, and because
angels, like men, love themselves, and he who loves himself experiences
changes of state; and he adds further that at times the angels are sad,
and that he, Swedenborg, discoursed with some when they were sad (_De
Caelo et Inferno_, Sec.
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