39. (5) All of this has been fully attested by personal observation. That a person lives as a person after death, that a male is then still a male, and a female a female, and that everyone's own love remains in him, especially love for the opposite sex and conjugial love - these points I have so far endeavored to establish by the sort of arguments that appeal to the intellect and are called rational. But from early childhood people have acquired the belief from parents and teachers, and afterward from the learned and the clergy, that a person will not live as a person after death until after the day of the Last Judgment, which they have been waiting for, now, for six thousand years. Because of this, and because many people have placed this question among matters to be accepted on faith and not with the understanding, it has become necessary that these same points be attested also by the affidavits of an eyewitness. Otherwise people who trust only in their senses will say, in accord with the faith instilled in them, "If people lived as people after death, I would see them and hear them. Besides, who has come down from heaven or ascended from hell and told us?" It has not been possible, however, neither is it possible, for any angel of heaven to descend or any spirit of hell to ascend so as to speak with any person, except with those who have had the inner faculties of their mind, the faculties of their spirit, opened by the Lord. And this cannot take place fully except in the case of those who have been prepared by the Lord to receive such things as have to do with spiritual wisdom. It has therefore pleased the Lord to do this with me, in order to keep the states of heaven and hell and the state of people's life after death from remaining unknown, and from being laid to sleep in ignorance, and from being finally buried in denial. But my personal observations and testimony regarding the points outlined above are too extensive to be presented here. I have presented them, however, in the book, Heaven and Hell, and then in Continuation Concerning the Spiritual World,* and later in The Apocalypse Revealed. Meanwhile, respecting marriages specifically, see what is presented here in the narrative accounts that come at the end of the sections or chapters of this book. * = Continuation Concerning the Last Judgment and the Spiritual World.