The Spirit of truth shall abide with you, and shall be in you, and ye shall know that I am in My Father, and ye in Me, and I in you. He that hath My commandments and doeth them, he it is that loveth Me; and We will come unto him, and make Our abode with him (John 14:17, 18, 20, 21, 23). [2] But with the evil the Lord is not present in every particular, because they have no faith or charity; but He is present in general, by which presence they have the faculty of thinking and willing, and also of receiving faith and charity; but only insofar as they desist from evils. Insofar as they do not desist from evils He appears absent; and the degrees of His absence are according to the absence of the truth and good of faith and of love. Thus they who are in heaven are in the presence of the Lord, but they who are in hell are in His absence. [3] Nevertheless the fact is that the Lord is not absent from man, but man is absent from the Lord, for the man who is in evils looks backward from Him; and then the things which are before his eyes are present with him according to their affinities with the evils in which he is; for in the other life there is no space, but only the appearance of space according to the affinities of the thoughts and affections. This closely resembles the presence of the sun of this world in respect to its light and heat; the sun is equally present at all times; but when the earth turns itself from the sun, the light perishes, and shade comes on; first the shade of evening, and then the shade of night. And when the earth does not look directly to the sun, but obliquely, as in the time of winter, the heat perishes, and cold comes on, in consequence of which all things of the earth become torpid and die. This is also called the absence of the sun, when nevertheless it is the absence of the earth from the sun-not as to space, but as to the state of light and heat. This is said for the sake of illustration.