Spiritual Experiences (Buss) n. 3443

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3443. The subject before mentioned being elevated to heaven in order that he might perceive a certain pleasantness communicated to me, inquired, "For what end is such pleasantness? for I supposed that one would place his happiness only in use, like the angels." Being then, conveyed among those who would have the whole heaven, without exception, to be as nothing, I perceived that he had [in that persuasion] his own felicity, thus not in any use; concerning which it was given to say, that mutual love, and a preference of another over one's self were angelic, and that then felicity was given by the Lord (:thus now or then I said to him:)* and that all were dedicated to their uses, some that they might be delighted in marriages, some in the love of infants, some in helping the distressed in temptations, some in resuscitating and introducing the dead, and so on. - 1748, October 2. * Parenthetical clauses, like the present, frequently occur in the pages of the Diary [now called Spiritual Experiences], and seemed designed to indicate some particular impression made, from the spiritual world, upon the writer's mind at the very time he was penning the paragraph. What this was cannot now be ascertained, any further than as the general scope of the context may afford grounds, more or less definite, for an inference respecting it. -Tr.


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