Miracles and Signs (Johnson) n. 6

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6. Some may wonder how it is that disbelievers in the other life, when they hear and thence know these facts, do not immediately come to a state of belief, acknowledge that the Lord rules the universe, and worship Him from the heart. With regard to such persons, I was taught by the angels that the principles of falsity from an evil life, which they have absorbed in the life of the body, oppose any such change. The false principles from the evil life so cling to their souls that they cannot be uprooted; their very life is in them. To take away the false principles and the evil would be to take away their life, and so they abide in them. The case is almost the same with man, but with this difference; he has an external or bodily memory, which is especially active while he lives in the world; those things which belong to his interior memory are terminated in the exterior memory as in the ultimate order. In the life of the body it is the exterior memory that can be perfected, and it is perfected by agreement with the interior. But in the other life the exterior memory is indeed present, yet nothing may be drawn from it, though it still serves there as a foundation for the interior memory. Hence it is that in the other life a man's interiors can be perfected no further than to the extent that there is agreement between these two memories, or to the extent that such agreement is not hindered by evils and falsities. The nature of these two memories may be seen from AC 2469-2494.


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