Arcana Coelestia (Elliott) n. 827

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827. Those who beguile by means of conjugial love and love towards small children - behaving in such a way that a husband has no reason to suspect that his guests are anything else but clean-minded, stainless, and friendly, and so under this and many other pretences commit adultery more safely - are in a hell beneath the buttocks in foulest excrement. There they experience vastation until they are no more than bones, for they are among the deceitful. Such individuals do not even know what conscience is. I have spoken to them and they have been amazed that anyone should have a conscience and that people say that acts of adultery are contrary to conscience. They have been told that it is as impossible for such conscienceless adulterers to enter heaven as it is for a fish to survive in the air or a bird above the air. For when merely approaching heaven they feel as though they are being choked, and their kind of delight is converted into a dreadful stench. They are then driven inevitably down into hell and at length become just like bones with little life, for when they lose that kind of life which they have acquired to themselves, no more than a mere trace of truly human life remains.


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