135. [136.] 3. All people who have not denied God with the mouth, even though denying Him at heart, and who have led a moral life because of the civil laws, when they come into the other life, then, for the sake of their reputation and consequent honors and material gains, convey themselves into societies where there are cities, and there, as in the world, live morally and well, owing to a fear of punishment and the loss of honor and material gain. But when their outward pretenses are stripped away and they are brought into their inner qualities, they rush into villainous evils. However, as the malicious among them grow in number, the society is then corrupted, on which account angels are sent there to examine their condition and to separate the good from the evil, and the good are either sent to the fringes of the society or removed. Then the city sinks with the evil into hell, to a depth commensurate with their malice. I once saw four angels sent to such a city, and when they arrived there they entered one of the houses; but the wicked inhabitants of the city, incited by their presence into a profound state of malice (as happens), rushed to the house where the angels were, crying out whether they did not wish to come out to engage in licentiousness, which they tried to urge them to do, and they attempted almost to do violence to them, but in vain. The event, in short, was like the event at Sodom, and the city was entirely destroyed and its inhabitants cast into hells. The reason they tried to draw the angels out to engage in licentiousness was that the people gathered there were ones who in the world had regarded adulterous affairs as allowable. They also were ones caught up in doctrinal falsities, because they paid no attention to the way they lived, and because they falsified the Word to confirm those falsities; and all who falsify the Word to confirm evils of life and doctrinal falsities regard adulterous affairs as allowable and are swept along into them.