boys fighting with each other; a crowd flocked around and looked on with much pleasure; and I was told that little boys are incited to such fights by their own parents.  Good spirits and angels who saw this through my eyes so revolted at it that I felt their horror; and especially that parents should incite their children to such things, saying that in this way parents extinguish in the earliest age all the mutual love and all the innocence that children have from the Lord, and initiate them into the spirit of hatred and revenge; consequently by their own endeavors they shut their children out of heaven, where there is nothing but mutual love.  Let parents therefore who wish well to their children beware of such things.

345.  What the difference is between those who die in childhood and those who die in mature life shall also be told.  Those dying in mature life have a plane acquired from the earthly and material world, and this they carry with them.  This plane is their memory and its bodily natural affection.  This remains fixed and becomes quiescent, but still serves their thought after death as an outmost plane, since the thought flows into it.  Consequently such as this plane is, and such as the correspondence is between the things that are in it and the rational faculty, such is the man after death.  But the children who die in childhood and are educated in heaven have no such plane, since they derive nothing from the material world and the earthly body; but they have a spiritual-natural plane.  For this reason they cannot be in such gross affections and consequent thoughts, since they derive all things from heaven.  Moreover, these children do not know that they were born in the world, but believe that they were born in heaven.  Neither do they know about any other than spiritual birth, which is effected through knowledges of good and truth and through intelligence and wisdom, from which man is a man; and as these are from the Lord they believe themselves to be the Lord’s own, and love to be so.  Nevertheless it is possible for the state of men who grow up on the earth to become as perfect as the state of children who grow up in heaven, provided they put away bodily and earthly loves, which are the loves of self and the world, and receive in their place spiritual loves.

346.  XXXVIII.  The wise and the simple in heaven.

It is believed that in heaven the wise will have more glory and eminence than the simple, because it is said in Daniel: 

     They that are intelligent shall shine as with the
     brightness of the firmament, and they that turn many to
     righteousness as the stars for ever and ever (12:3).

But few know who are meant by the “intelligent” and by those that “turn many to righteousness.”  The common belief is that they are such as are called the accomplished and learned, especially such as have taught in the church and have surpassed others in acquirements and in preaching, and still more such among them as have converted many to the faith.  In the world all such are regarded as the intelligent; nevertheless such are not the intelligent in heaven that are spoken of in these words, unless their intelligence is heavenly intelligence.  What this is will now be told.