4369. HOW EXPEDITIOUSLY PUNISHMENTS ARE INFLICTED; CONCERNING PUNISHMENTS; A HYPOCRITE. I was surrounded by diabolical genii, and that too on account of the hypocrite, for a hypocrite has such a sphere that he collects around him from all sides the very worst of spirits; the reason is, that he regards himself supremely and fills his sphere with the image [or reflection] of himself, and thus gathers around him from all sides the evil and the upright - the evil as being delighted to plot and hold the hypocrite as a subject, and the good, that they may be excited to favor the hypocrite when he speaks sanctimoniously, protests his innocence, and makes himself without guile, and other things of like kind. Many similar spirits therefore of the female sex together with unnatural ones [cum innaturalibus] flocked around me, and also many from hell who stood below, and whom I had not before observed. At length, from being of such a quality, they virtually summoned the punishers, who were such that they could at once know where they were, what they thought, what they said to each other, and who treated as cats do mice those that supposed themselves able to effect everything and to have mastered all arts, making in fact no more of their boasted cunning. Indeed they added scoffs and jeers to their tortures which were effected in regard to the first named party by collisions frontwise [antrosum], and in regard to the unnatural ones by such fractures of the bones as that there was scarcely anything left whole, and this from one to another, in order. The punishers then proposed to them to exercise their arts, which they also did, but they were all children's play to them, while they regarded them from one to another, as the cat does the mouse. - 1749, August 22.