646. After death good, which is charity, and evil, which is wickedness, are imputed to people, as has been proved to me by all my experience regarding the fate of those who pass from this world to the next. Everyone after a few days there has his character examined, which includes what his attitude to religion was in his previous world. When the examination is concluded, the examiners make a report to heaven, and the person is then sent to join people like him, so he joins his own. That is how imputation works. All in heaven have good imputed to them, all in hell evil; this is made plain to me by the way both heaven and hell are ordered by the Lord. The whole of heaven is arranged into communities answering to all the varieties of the love for good, the whole of hell into communities answering to all the varieties of the love for evil. The Lord's arrangement of the church on earth is similar, since it corresponds to heaven. Good is its religion.
[2] Moreover, ask anyone you like - from this or the other two continents - who is endowed with religious feeling and also with powers of reasoning, who he thinks will go to heaven and who to hell. They will all agree in their answer, that those who do good go to heaven and those who do evil go to hell. Again, who does not know that every truly human being loves a person, a group of many people, a city or a kingdom because of the good in them? In fact the same applies not only to people, but also to animals, and to inanimate objects like houses, possessions, estates, gardens, trees, woods, land, even metals and stones. All these are loved for their goodness and for the purpose they serve; good and purpose are one. Why then, must not the Lord love mankind and the church for the good in them?
This page is part of 
© 2000-2001 The Academy of the New Church