and draws forth grateful and sweet odors; but the same heat flowing into excrementitious and decaying substances produces putrefactions, and draws forth rank and disgusting stenches.  In like manner the light from the same sun produces in one subject beautiful and pleasing colors, in another unbeautiful and disagreeable colors.  The same is true of the heat and light from the sun of heaven, which is love.  When the heat, or love, from that sun flows into good, as it does in good men and angels, it makes their good fruitful; but when it flows into the evil it produces a contrary effect, for their evils either suffocate it or pervert it.  In like manner when the light of heaven flows into the truths of good it imparts intelligence and wisdom; but when it flows into the falsities of evil it is turned into insanities and phantasies of various kinds.  Thus in every instance the result is in accordance with reception.

570.  As infernal fire is the love of self and of the world it is also every lust of these loves, since lust is love in its continuity, for what a man loves he continually lusts after.  Infernal fire is also delight, since what a man loves and lusts after he perceives, when he obtains it, to be delightful.  Man’s delight of heart is from no other source.  Infernal fire, therefore, is the lust and delight that spring from these two loves as their origins.  The evils flowing from these loves are contempt of others, enmity, and hostility against those who do not favor them, envy, hatred, and revenge, and from these fierceness and cruelty; and in respect to the Divine they are denial and consequent contempt, derision, and detraction of the holy things of the church; and after death, when man becomes a spirit, these evils are changed to anger and hatred against these holy things (see above, n. 562).  And as these evils breathe forth continually the destruction and murder of those whom they account as enemies, and against whom they burn with hatred and revenge, so it is the delight of their life to will to destroy and kill, and so far as they are unable to do this, to will to do mischief, to injure, and to exercise cruelty. [2] Such is the meaning of “fire” in the Word, where the evil and the hells are treated of, some passages from which I will here quote in the way of proof: 

Everyone is a hypocrite and an evil doer, and every mouth speaketh folly.  For wickedness burneth as the fire; it devoureth the briers and thorns, and kindleth in the thickets of the forests, and they roll upward in the rising of smoke; and the people is become like food for fire; no man spareth his brother (Isa. 9:17-19).

     I will show wonders in the heavens, and in the earth blood
     and fire, and pillars of smoke; the sun shall be turned
     into darkness (Joel 2:30, 31).

     The land shall become burning pitch; it shall not be
     quenched night nor day; the smoke thereof shall go up
     forever (Isa. 34:9, 10).