A WORLD OF ACTION
All heaven's delights are united to uses and inhere in them, because uses are the goods of love and charity, in which the angels are. The angels find all their happiness in use, from use, and according to use. There is the highest freedom in this because it proceeds from interior affection, and is conjoined with ineffable delight. Uses exist in the heavens in all variety and diversity. Never is the use of one angel quite the same as that of another; nor the delight. What is more, the delights of any one person's use are countless. These countless and various delights are nevertheless united in an order so that they mutually regard one another, as do the uses of every member, organ and inner part of the body. They are even more like the uses of each vessel and fibre in every member, organ and vital part; each and all of which are so related that they regard each of its own good in the other, and thus in all, and all in each. As a result of this general and several regard they act as one.
—Heaven and Hell, nn. 402, 403, 404, 405
OUR CHILDREN IN HEAVEN
Every little child, wheresoever born, whether within the Church or out of it, whether of pious parents or of impious, is received by the Lord at death; is educated in heaven; is taught and imbued with affections of good and by these with knowledges of truth; and then, as he is perfected in intelligence and wisdom, is introduced into heaven and becomes an angel.
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.