5556. THAT ANGELS HAVE THE HUMAN FORM. Everything of the life of man, conspires, from the Lord, to the human form, the least and greatest of it. Everything of truth and of good, belonging to the understanding from its will, which is from the Lord, strives after the human form; for the reason that the Lord is Man, and heaven in its complex is a man. Hence is the human form with man; hence, also, with a spirit; hence, also, with an angel. When man lays down his body he has the human form; and when a spirit is laid to sleep as to the exteriors which are in the human form, he is under the human form still more perfectly. The soul is a man. If you say that the soul is the very life which inflows from the Divine, that is in the human form; for, whatsoever is from the Divine, thus from the Lord, is human in form. Love, or the good of love, is the very esse of that form; and truth thence, when it becomes good, is the very existere from that esse. That many learned men doubt about the resurrection, and have a notion about a resurrection of the body, is because they have thought about the soul from theories, and have had about it only the idea of wind: and some, differently, as of air, of fire, of flame. Hence that learning has blinded them, and confounded and annihilated the interior perception about man's life after death. The simple are different, unless they think similarly about the soul. Wherefore, in Christendom, when they think about the soul after death, they are not able to have an idea of the human form; when, nevertheless, that idea remains with all who have not annihilated the interior perception concerning the life after death by such [notions]: for example, those who are outside the learned world, all Mohammedans, and the wise heathen. That such idea, amongst the learned in the Christian world, is from that source, was shown by their ideas being examined and discovered to be such; and there was not only doubt in them, but also negation from them. In that obscurity [of their minds] were such things as suffocated all heavenly light about the life after death. The ideas of the simple were also examined; and it was found that they entirely agree [with those] of a spirit concerning himself. Everyone's faith is according to his ideas. Those of them, who have thought about the life after death from the impossibility that the universal heaven along with the stars, sun and earth, should perish, and that [then] man's body, [consumed] by worms, mice, fishes, and divided and scattered to every quarter of the globe [should undergo resurrection], have denied the resurrection; which denial being once made, is afterwards buttressed by various arguments. Because man in the Christian world is such, it has been permitted him to believe that the body would undergo resurrection at a certain last judgment: otherwise, all who thought from their intellectual would have rejected the doctrine about the resurrection; which being rejected, everything of the Church and of heaven with man perishes.