To the early reader of Swedenborg’s writings, few of his declarations appear stranger, at first, than his affirmation that the Last Judgment is past, that it took place in 1757. Yet although startling at first, it is a doctrine which, on closer acquaintance, readily comes within the grasp of reason and common sense; and we discover that all its early strangeness was owing to our having looked at it through the mist of prejudice and preconceived opinion. The treatise on the Last Judgment, (although, as to size, only a pamphlet,) is a most effective and masterly exposition of the nature of the end of the church, the new heavens, and the new earth of the Apocalypse. In the first place, it is shown that the day of the Last Judgment does not mean that of the destruction of the world; for neither the visible heaven nor the habitable earth will perish, but both will remain forever. The reason is that the heaven of angels is formed from the human race, all angels having lived the life of men, and none having been so created; and as the perfection of heaven increases to eternity with the increase of regenerate men from the world, it follows that the earth will never cease to exist, nor men to live and be born upon it. The world is the seminary of heaven. Heaven depends upon the world for its growth, increase, and perfection. Heaven could not exist without worlds. Heaven being formed from the human race, so likewise is Hell; all devils and satans having at one time been men on this or some other earth. “That is not first which is spiritual, but that which is natural.” These doctrines, it will be seen, militate against what are called orthodox opinions, which teach that angels were created before the world, and that no man can go to heaven or to hell before the time of the Last Judgment; when the souls of men having returned into their bodies, the visible world will be burned up; the sun and moon be quenched in nature’s night; and the stars, each surrounded with its own system of worlds, having first fallen upon this speck of a globe, are to be wiped out of existence. These common but crude and unscriptural ideas have afforded the best subjects for scoffing at the Christian religion which the skeptic could desire. For he triumphantly asks, How can so vast a heaven, and so many stars, with sun and moon, be destroyed and dissipated? And how can the stars fall from heaven upon the earth, when they are larger than the earth? How can men’s bodies, eaten up by worms, consumed by putrefaction, scattered to all winds, absorbed by vegetation, and again incorporated into other men’s systems, be re-collected for their souls? What is this day of Judgment? And has it not been expected for ages in vain? Together with many other such questions, all pertinent, but to which the church can give no rational answer.