When these words had been spoken, I looked to the border of the west and behold, there appeared pools as though of fire and brimstone, and I asked the angel, "Why do the hells there appear like that?" He answered: "They appear as pools from their falsifications of truth, water in the spiritual sense being truth; and fire, as it were, appears around and within them, from the love of evil, and brimstone from the love of what is false. These three, the pool, fire, and brimstone, are appearances because they are correspondences of the evil loves in which they are. All who are there are shut up in eternal workhouses where they labor for food, clothing, and bed; and when they do evil, they are severely and miserably punished." [2] I further asked the angel, "Why did you say that in that place are spiritual and natural adulterers? Why not say evil doers and the impious?" He answered, "Because all who repute adulteries as nothing, that is, who believe from confirmation that they are not sins and so commit them of set purpose, are at heart evil doers and impious; for the human conjugial and religion go together in even pace. Every step and every move made from religion and into religion is also a step and a move made from the conjugial which is peculiar and proper to the Christian, and into the conjugial." To the question, "What is that conjugial?" he said, "It is the desire to live with one wife alone; and a Christian has this desire according to his religion." [3] After this I grieved in spirit that marriages, which in the ancient Ages had been most holy, are so hopelessly changed into adulteries. And the angel said: "It is the same at this day with religion; for the Lord says:

In the consummation of the age there shall be the abomination of desolation foretold by Daniel. And there shall be great affliction, such as hath not been from the beginning of the world. Matt. 24:15, 21. The abomination of desolation signifies the falsification and deprivation of all truth; affliction signifies the state of the Church infested by evils and falses; and the consummation of the age, of which these words are spoken, signifies the last time or end of the Church. The end is now; for there is no truth left which has not been falsified, and falsification of truth is spiritual whoredom which acts as one with natural whoredom because they cleave together."