28.
(i) A person lives on as a person after death. It has not so far been known that a person lives on as a person after death for the reasons which have just been mentioned. It is surprising that this
is even true in Christendom, where the Word is known to give enlightenment about everlasting life, and where the Lord Himself teaches that all the dead rise again, and God is not the God of the dead,
but of the living (Matt. 22:31, 32; Luke 20:37, 38). Moreover, as far as the affections and thoughts of a person's mind are concerned, he is in the company of angels and spirits, and so closely associated
with them that he cannot be torn away from them except by dying. This ignorance is all the more surprising, when everyone who has died from the beginning of creation has come or is coming to his
own people, or, as the Word has it, he has been or is being gathered to them.
In addition, people have a general impression, which is none other than the influence of heaven on the inner levels of
the mind, which causes him to have an inward perception of truths, and so to speak to see them. This allows him to grasp this truth in particular, that a person continues to live as a person after death,
happily if he has led a good life, unhappily if not. Surely everyone has this thought, if he lifts his mind a little above the body and thinks beyond the immediate level of the senses, as happens
when he is deep in the worship of God, or when he lies on his death-bed awaiting his last breath, and similarly when he hears people speaking about the departed and their fate. I have related thousands
of facts about the departed, telling their brothers, wives and friends the fate of some of them. I have also written about the fate of the British, the Dutch, the Roman Catholics, the Jews, and
the heathen, and about the fate of Luther, Calvin and Melanchthon. But up to the present I have never heard anyone remark, 'How can that be their fate, when they have not yet been resurrected from their
graves, since the Last Judgment has not yet taken place? Surely they are in the meantime souls, mere puffs of wind, in some limbo called Pu*?' I have never heard anyone say such things, and this
has allowed me to draw the conclusion that each person has a private perception that he lives on as such after death. Does not any husband who loves his wife, his young or older children, say to himself
when they are dying or dead, that they are in God's hands, and he will see them again after his own death, and he will again share with them a life of love and joy? * Literally, 'in some Pu or where.'
Pu is the Greek word for 'where'. See 29 below.
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