The universal hell, like heaven, is as one man,—not of beauty, as heaven, but a hideous monster. In its collective capacity, it is the Devil and Satan; the Devil is the name of its evil, and Satan is the name of its falsity. There is no individual evil spirit ruling hell, and bearing either of those names. An enlightened view of Scripture confirms this doctrine in every point, and rids us of the innumerable absurdities which the commonly received theory in regard to the Devil involves. There is no spirit in hell who was not once a man on earth. There is no spirit in hell who was ever an angel in heaven. The Lord himself rules the hells, and by all means possible restrains their violence and mitigates their suffering. Some people believe that God turns away his face from man, rejects him, and casts him into hell, and that he is angry with him on account of his evils; and others go still further, and affirm that God punishes man, and brings evil upon him. They also confirm this opinion from the literal sense of the Word, in which expressions occur that appear to sustain it. But these opinions are formed through ignorance of the real sense of these passages, and from a blind neglect of others, the literal sense of which teaches that God is goodness and mercy itself, and that fury is not in him. Isaiah xxvii. 4. True doctrine declares that the Lord never turns away his face from man, never rejects him, never casts any one into hell, and is never angry. The Lord is continually withdrawing man from evil and leading him to good; but man’s freedom is never taken away. If man _will love_ evil and _will do_ perversely, the Lord does not prevent. That man should go to hell is at variance with the Divine design; but to infringe man’s freedom would be to destroy his life and take from him all that is human, reducing him to the level of a machine or a brute. Those who are in hell, cast themselves down thither, and keep themselves where they are. “This is,” as Wilkinson says, “he last dogma of free will,—that of a finite being perpetuating for ever his own evil, standing fast to selfishness without end, excluding Omnipotence in all its dispensations, and making the ‘will not’ into an everlasting ‘cannot,’ to maintain itself out of heaven, and contrary to heaven.” This is a very brief abstract of the leading ideas in Swedenborg’s wondrous treatise on Heaven and Hell. We are well aware how far short it falls of doing full justice to the work. Let us hope that what has been said may induce some to make a personal acquaintance with it; and then they will understand the difficulties we labor under in condensing within a few pages its multitudinous facts and closely linked logic.