5979. Anyone who is a believer thinks that none but angels from heaven are present with him and that spirits who are devils have been totally removed from him. But I can positively declare that in the case of someone in whom the yearnings and delights belonging to self-love and love of the world exist and are his end in view, those spirits are present and so close to him that they are in him, controlling both his thoughts and his affections. Angels from heaven cannot possibly be present within a sphere emanating from such thoughts and affections, only outside it. This being so, the angels depart as hellish spirits come nearer. Yet the angels from heaven never depart completely from a person, for if they did he would be done for. Left without his contact with heaven through the angels he could not live.

[2] The truth that spirits from hell and angels from heaven are present with a person is also in some measure contained in the faith taught by Christian Churches. For their teachings state that all good comes from God, and that evil comes from the devil; and preachers reinforce it by their pulpit prayer that God may control their thoughts and words, and by their assertion that with the righteous all things, even the least of their endeavours, begin in God. Those preachers also say that when a person leads a good life he allows himself to be led by God, and in addition that angels are sent from God to help him; or they will say, when someone has performed an extremely evil deed, that he has allowed himself to be led by the devil and that any evil like that comes from hell. They would also have said that spirits from hell were flowing into the interior evils belonging to the person's thought and will, if they had recognized those evils to be just as great.

4192. 'Gather stones; and they took stones and made a heap' means truths arising out of good. This is clear from the meaning of 'stones' as truths, dealt with just above in 4190, and from the meaning of 'a heap' as good. The reason why 'a heap' means good is that in former times before they used to construct altars people made heaps and ate on them as a witness to their being joined together in love. But later on, when the representatives of the ancients were regarded as being holy, instead of heaps they built altars, which also consisted of stones but arranged more methodically, Joshua 22:28, 34. This is why 'a heap' has a similar meaning to an altar, namely the good of love, the stones of it meaning the truths of faith.