When children die, they are still children in the other life.  They have the same infantile mind, the same innocence in ignorance, and the same tenderness in all things.  They have only the rudimentary capacity of becoming angels; for children are not yet angels, but are to become angels.  The state of children in the other life far surpasses that of children in the world; for they are not clothed with an earthly body, but with a body like that of the angels.  The earthly body is in itself heavy, and does not receive its first sensations and impulses from the interior or spiritual world, but from the exterior or natural world.  In this world, therefore, infants must learn to walk, to control the body’s motions, and to talk.  Even their senses, like sight and hearing, must be developed by use.  It is quite otherwise with children in the other life.  Being spirits, they act at once in expression of their inner being, walking without practice, and also talking, but at first from general affections not yet distinguished into ideas of thought.  They are quickly initiated into these, too, however; and this for the reason that outer and inner are homogeneous with them.

The Lord flows into the ideas of children chiefly from their inmost soul, for nothing has closed their ideas, as with adults.  No false principles have closed them to the understanding of truth, nor any evil life to the reception of good, nor to becoming wise.

—­Heaven and Hell, nn. 416, 330, 331, 836

TOWARD THE MORNING OF LIFE

The Lord is present with every human being, urgent and instant to be received; and when a man receives Him, as he does when he acknowledges Him as his God, Creator, Redeemer and Saviour, then is His first Coming, which is called the dawn.  From this time the man begins to be enlightened, as to understanding in things spiritual, and to advance into a more and more interior wisdom.  As he receives this wisdom from the Lord, so he advances through morning into day, and this day lasts with him into old age, even to death; and after death he passes into heaven to the Lord Himself, and there, though he died an old man, he is restored to the morning of his life, and to eternity he develops the beginnings of the wisdom that was implanted in the natural world.

—­True Christian Religion, n. 766

The people of heaven are continually advancing towards the spring-time of life; and the more thousands of years they live, the more delightful and happy is the spring to which they attain.  Women who have died old and worn out with age, and have lived in faith in the Lord and in charity to the neighbor, come, with the succession of years, more and more into the flower of youth and early womanhood, and into a beauty exceeding every idea of beauty ever formed through the sight.  In a word, to grow old in heaven is to grow young.

—­Heaven and Hell, n. 414