"But we will hope that the wicked will not adhere to his evil will for ever. A wicked man often experiences a change of nature when he sees something good. Therefore, it is our duty to show him what is good. The consciousness of fatality and being damned comes to everyone, even to the incredulous. That proves that there is an inborn sense of justice, a need to punish oneself, and that quite independent of dogmas. Moreover, it is a gross falsehood that the doctrine of hell was invented by Christianity. Greeks and Romans knew Hades and Tartarus with their refined tortures; the Jews had their Sheol and Gehenna; the cheerful Japanese rival Dante with their Inferno. It is therefore thoughtless nonsense to make Christian theology solely responsible for the doctrine of hell. It would be just as fair to trace it to the cheerful view of life of the Greeks and Romans, who first came upon the idea." ="Desolation."=--The teacher continued: "When this feeling of fatality strikes an unbeliever, it often appears as the so-called persecution-mania. He believes himself, for example, persecuted by men who wish to poison him. Since his intelligence is so low that he cannot rise to the idea of God, his evil conscience makes him conjure up evil men as his persecutors. Thus he does not understand that it is God who is pursuing him, and therefore he dies or goes mad. "But he who has strength enough to bow himself, or intelligence enough to guess at a method in this madness, cries to God for help and grace, and escapes the madhouse. After a season of self-chastisement, life begins to grow lighter; peace returns; he succeeds in his undertakings; his 'Green Island' again blooms with spring. This feeling of woebegoneness often occurs about the fortieth or fiftieth year. It is the balancing of books at the solstice. The whole past is summed up, and the debit-side shows a plus which makes one despair. Scenes of earlier life pass by like a panorama, seen in a new light; long-forgotten incidents reappear even in their smallest details. The opening of the sealed Book of Life, spoken of in the Revelation, is a veritable reality. It is the day of judgment. The children of the Lord of Dung who have lost their intelligence understand nothing, but buy bromkali at the chemist's and take sick-leave because of 'neurasthenia.' That is a Greek word, which serves them as an amulet. "Swedenborg calls this natural process 'the desolation' of the wicked. The pietists call it the 'awakening' before conversion."