NOTE:

The Table of Content directly below is from page 203 of the Sixth Fascicle of De Hemelsche Leer.
It has been copied here for the convenience of the reader.

_____________________________________________________________________________________

[203]

[ TABLE OF ] CONTENTS 

[ From Page 203 of Sixth Fascicle of De Hemelsche Leer ]

Leading Theses propounded in DE HEMELSCHE LEER . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 2

An Address on the Occasion of the Dedication of the New Church-Building,

by H. D. G. Groeneveld . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 3

To live a Life following the Doctrine I, by Anton Zelling . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .  7

To live a Life following the Doctrine II, by Anton Zelling . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .  21

The Nineteenth of June 1935, by H. D. G. Groeneveld . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .  33

To live a Life following the Doctrine III, by Anton Zelling . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 37

Tragedy and Regeneration, by Norman Williams . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 63

The Holy Spirit, by Rev. Elmo C. Acton . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 75

"Nunc Licet", by J. H. Ridgway . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 91

Editorial, by Rev. Ernst Pfeiffer . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .  101

The Church as our Spiritual Mother, by Rev. Hendrik W. Boef . . . . . . . . . . . . . .  104

Faith and to Believe I, by Anton Zelling . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 116

Faith and to Believe II, by Anton Zelling . . . . . . . . . .. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 121

Communications, by Anton Zelling, Prof. dr. Charles H. van Os, Rev. Theodore
Pitcairn, C. P. Geluk, N. J. Vellenga, H. M. Haverman, Rev. Albert Bjorck . . . . . . . 157

The New Will and New Understanding which are the Lord's with Man,
by Rev. Theodore Pitcairn . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 167

New Things, by Anton Zelling . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 171

Communications, by Anton Zelling . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 201

......  END OF TABLE OF CONTENTS  ......
From Page 203

[1]

DE HEMELSCHE LEER

A MONTHLY MAGAZINE

DEVOTED TO THE DOCTRINE OF GENUINE TRUTH

OUT OF THE LATIN WORD REVEALED FROM THE LORD

ORGAN OF THE FIRST DUTCH SOCIETY OF THE

GENERAL CHURCH OF THE NEW JERUSALEM

[ WHICH BECAME PART OF

NOVA DOMINI ECCLESIA QUAE EST NOVA HIEROSOLYMA -

THE LORD'S NEW CHURCH WHICH IS NOVA HIEROSOLYMA

in 1937]

EXTRACTS FROM THE ISSUES NOVEMBER 1934 TO AUGUST 1936

(ENGLISH TRANSLATION AND ENGLISH ORIGINALS)

_____________

SIXTH FASCICLE

s-GRAVENHAGE

SWEDENBORG GENOOTSCHAP

NASSAUPLEIN 29

1937

[2]

LEADING THESES PROPOUNDED IN
“DE HEMELSCHE LEER”

1. The Writings of Emanuel Swedenborg are the Third Testament of the Word of the Lord. The Doctrine of the New Jerusalem Concerning the Sacred Scripture must be applied to the three Testaments alike.



2. The Latin Word without Doctrine is as a candlestick without light, and those who read the Latin Word without Doctrine, or who do not acquire for themselves a Doctrine from the Latin Word, are in darkness as to all truth (cf. S.S. 50-61).



3. The genuine Doctrine of the Church is spiritual out of celestial origin, but not out of rational origin. The Lord is that Doctrine itself (c.f. A.C. 2496, 2497, 2510, 2516, 2533, 2859; A.E. 19).

MEMORABILIA 1312

“Si veritates ut theses seu principia accipiunt, tunc veritates innumerae deteguntur, et omnia confirmant”.

“If they accept truths as theses or principles, then innumerable truths are detected, and all things confirm.”

[3]

DE HEMELSCHE LEER

EXTRACT FROM THE ISSUE FOR NOVEMBER 1934

AN ADDRESS

BY H. D. G. GROENEVELD DELIVERED AT THE SOCIAL SUPPER, OCTOBER 28TH 1934, ON THE OCCASION OF THE DEDICATION OF THE NEW CHURCH·BUILDING.

The use the Church will perform in its new dwelling is determined by and therefore is entirely dependent on the use that the Lord performs in its interior dwelling. If there is no interior dwelling which is the Lord's alone, then the use which the Church performs in its exterior dwelling is of no significance, however its work in this world might appear as use. The essential would be lacking in its new dwelling and all its exterior would be appearance only. Since the exterior, without the essential which is the Lord's, carries seduction in it, the Church would not be able to resist the charm of that exterior and would soon be brought to accept the appearance itself as the essence. No longer Heaven, but the world would be put up as the end of life, as a result of which charity and faith would be directed to the things of the world. The Church would draw the world to itself, and the more it accepted its exterior as essential, the greater would be its power of attraction. Indeed the Church would thereby considerably increase in growth, but it would have had the gates of the Heavens closed and would have opened the gates of hell.

It is however of the Lord's Divine Providence that the Church has been led to a new dwelling, although the end as yet is scarcely visible and down there it is surrounded by countless dark clouds. The interior dwelling for it is present already.

This interior dwelling came into existence the moment the interior things descended into the natural, which have been given to the Church, belonged to the good of life of the Church. These interior things in the natural penetrated

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to the not-conjoined human things which, with the interior things that previously were present, could still maintain their life. Since the new interior things cannot be conjoined with these human things, there arose not only a resistance but also a revolt against these interior things, which resulted in a suffering of these things. Fiercer and fiercer grew the revolt, until finally the human things led the new interior things to crucifixion. By this the human things which previously still had life, were deprived of life. It therefore was not a coincidence, but in correspondence with the state of the Church that the last Lesson from the New Testament in the old dwelling was the chapter of the Lord's Crucifixion.

In the love for the living truth in the human things, to which love alone all help in the agony was directed, the new human things from the Divine Human of the Lord, with which human things the new interior things are conjoined, could now come to life. It is the good of life of these new human things which is now the interior dwelling. In this dwelling the man of the Church is in real peace, and he lies down to rest under the protection of the only Lord. It is in this dwelling that the conjunction takes place of the most exterior things with the most interior, and of the most interior things with the most exterior. This conjunction is described in the 28th chapter of Genesis, verses 10-13, where we read: "And Jacob went out from Beer-sheba, and went toward Haran. And he lighted upon a certain place, and tarried there all night, because the sun was set; and he took of the stones of that place, and put them for his pillows, and lay down in that place to sleep. And he dreamed, and behold a ladder set up on the earth, and the top of it reached to heaven: and behold the Angels of God ascending and descending on it. And, behold, Jehovah stood above it, and said, I am Jehovah, the God of Abraham thy father, and the God of Isaac: the land whereon thou liest, to thee will I give it, and to thy seed". It is this dwelling alone that is the entrance to Heaven, and it is out of this alone that the Word can be approached. It is the holy place, it is the house of God, as appears from the continuation of the 28th chapter, verses 16-17: "And Jacob awaked out of his sleep, and he said, Surely Jehovah is in this place, and I knew it not. And he was afraid, and said, How dreadful

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is this place. This is none other but the house of God, and this is the gate of heaven".

No man of the Church can read the Word holily but out of the interior dwelling. In this dwelling he comes into the light of truth, for it is the dwelling of the Lord, and there alone is the light, because the Lord Himself is the light. It is only out of the good of life from the interior things descended into the natural, that we can enter the interior dwelling. Out of the good of life of this world there is no entrance to this dwelling, for in this apparent good the evil and the false of the love of self are hidden. This good desires admittance on the strength of faith, while the essential love to the Lord and to the neighbour is lacking. It is this good that is represented by the five foolish virgins, of whom we read the following in the 25th chapter of the Gospel of Matthew, verses 10-12: "And while they went to buy, the bridegroom came; and they that were ready went in with him to the marriage: and the door was shut. Afterward came also the other virgins, saying, Lord, Lord, open to us. But he answered and said, Verily I say unto you, I know you not".

Let us therefore go to the interior dwelling that we may there meet each other. Then the glory will appear in this new dwelling, which we have entered to-day, for the only Lord will be in it.

[.... NOTE: Page 6 is Blank .... ]

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EXTRACT FROM THE ISSUE FOR MARCH 1935

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TO LIVE A LIFE FOLLOWING THE DOCTRINE

A.C. 3652.

The Latin for "following" [according to] is secundum, from sequor: something which immediately follows, as 2 follows from 1 (hence the meaning of secundus: the next following, the second), as the effect from a cause; all effect is according to or following the cause. The Latin word for "following" [according to] also signifies: to willingly follow, along with the stream, well disposed to, prosperous, happy; the Greek word for "following" further signifies: altogether, fully, near, to, at, in.

This secundum also lies involved in: "Hoc est primum et magnum Mandatum; secundum simile est illi" ("This is the first and great Commandment; the second is like unto it"), Matth. XXII: 38, 39. To live a life following the Doctrine is the second which is like unto the Doctrine. It is said to live, not, to do, to act, to conduct one's self, nor anything else. Now to live is to love and to hold holy what is of Life and to be filled with that Life more and more. "To love God and the neighbour is of life because the all of life is of love", A.C. 9383. Thus in "living a life following the Doctrine" the two Commandments are fulfilled: "To love the Lord thy God with all thy heart, with all thy

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soul, and with all thy mind", and "To love thy neighbour as thyself". The neighbour is the Lord in the neighbour, the Doctrine of the neighbour. The first commandment refers to the Lord, the second to the angelic Heaven in the blessed consociation of all with each and of each with all. So too the Doctrine refers to the Lord, and "to live a life following the Doctrine" to the angelic Heaven on earth or the Church.

Only that lives which lives a life following the Doctrine. All living or loving outside of the Doctrine is not life or love; it remains natural, unreformed, and allows of no regeneration. There are those who accept the Doctrine and reject the life. Of them it is said: "They are present, although separated. They are like friends who talk with one another, but have no love for one another; and they are like two persons, one of whom speaks to the other as a friend, and yet hates him as an enemy", D.P. 91. It is acknowledging the Lord with the mere cognition and meanwhile remaining outside the Divine Human and hating it as an enemy.

Man is in the spirit when he is alone, but in the body when he is in company. Therefore in the world it is not so visible who rejects life and who lives a life following the Doctrine. From Matthew XXV, verse 34 to the end, it even appears that they who have lived a life following the Doctrine, the followers, and they who have rejected the life, the rejecters, are equally ignorant of whether or not having done anything "unto one of the least of these My brethren"; yea, elsewhere it appears that the followers have not known of it, and that the rejecters did not know but that they had prophesied in the name of the Lord, and in His Name had cast out devils, and in His Name had done many wonderful works, Matth. VII: 22. "To live a life following the Doctrine" and "to reject life", taken as effects, thus appear exteriorly before and in the world as indistinguishable, no less so than the delight of conjugial love and that of scortatory love, and no less so than the preaching from the spiritual sense and the preaching from the natural sense.

“Man's understanding can be raised above his proper love into some light of wisdom in the love of which the man is not, and he can thereby see and be taught how he must live that he may come also into that love, and thus may enjoy

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the blessedness into the eternal", D.L.W. 395. Now this life he can either follow or reject; the Doctrine to appearances remains the same; and everything the Doctrine teaches concerning life the rejecter can know as well as, if not better than the follower. Seen from a worldly point of view the rejecters are even not so bad and in many things even exemplary. For they who do not reject the Doctrine, but the life, do not therefore reject everything which the Doctrine teaches concerning life. They can even fit it in in an exemplary way, "put it into practice", to such an extent that their fittings in, in public, leave the applications in secret of the followers far in the shade. There is a difference as of an abyss between fitting the truths of the Doctrine into the life, and applying life to the Doctrine, just as the former life is in no way the latter life. Fitting in is always of something to something entirely different and which remains entirely different; applying, however, is always of something to something that is distinctly one with it and which becomes more and more the same. Explicare, to unfold, to unpleat, supposes applicate, to fold to, to apply, in order that understanding and will may keep pace with each other, in order that Doctrine may become life, and life Doctrine - a one, full of doc­trine and life. When fitting in, man is not in the love of the wisdom which he fancies he has; when applying, man is in the love of his wisdom. The fitting in is forced compulsion of an indoctrinated proprium, the applying is the freedom of an angelic proprium; the fitting in is made, tyrannical, fanatical; the applying is born, gentle, mild; the fitting in is into heterogeneous things, the applying to homogeneous things. The fitting in of things to life leaves dead, the applying of life makes living and new. Fitting in knows zeal, emulation, rivalry; applying knows quiet steady diligence. The fitting in is with the whole head above out of a certain light of wisdom while the body below remains outside the love of that wisdom; the applying is with the whole heart, the whole soul, and the whole understanding; in short, the fitting in is from the love of self and the world, the applying is out of the two commandments fulfilled. To acknowledge, the Lord and to reject the life is to acknowledge the Son of Man and to withhold from Him the place where to lay His head, thus in no way to

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acknowledge Him. To “live a life following the Doctrine" on the other hand is to allow the Lord to make a dwelling with man. To reject life is to retain and carry on one's own life "under the appearance of much praying", that is, under respectable fittings in, in which merit makes itself great. For they can glory in and appeal to "many wonderful works done". In "CONCERNING THE SACRED SCRIPTURE FROM EXPERIENCE" there occur two reasonings: I. "l know various correspondences, I can know the true doctrine of the Divine Word, the spiritual sense will teach me it". II. "I know the Doctrine of Divine truth; now I can see the spiritual sense, if only I know the correspondences; but nevertheless this must be in enlightenment from the Lord, because the spiritual sense is the Divine Truth itself in its light", n. 21. Clearly the false first reasoning is that of the rejecter ever ready to fit in. What the follower with reverence calls the "Doctrine of Divine Truth", the rejecter calls “various correspondences", handled as burglars' implements. He means to say: "I can fit those in, I can push in with them, and force my way". Note how the tone and the affection in the words of both reasonings differ entirely as to the life. "l know various correspondences" has as its affection "by now I surely possess sufficient means". On the other hand, in "I know the Doctrine of Divine truth" there is an entirely different tone. "I know", there does not mean "I possess". And "if only I know the correspondences" is full of a life following the Doctrine. This latter knowing is an entirely different knowing from the "I know" of the first reasoning. That first knowing, the rejecter's knowing, is, as has been said, a possession, a piece of mere memory-knowledge; the latter knowing "if only I know" is of a life entirely following the Doctrine, in the realization that there is no living science of correspondences without a life in agreement with the Doctrine of the Divine truth. Is it not somewhere expressly said that there is perception when the external things correspond to the internal things? Now the follower makes the knowing of correspondences subject to his perception, but the rejecter makes no such fuss - "1 know various correspondences". How false, how full of denial of life that sounds. And how full of awe and reverence, vibrating with love and veneration, how living sounds, on the

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other hand: “If only I know, but nevertheless this must be in enlightenment from the Lord". There is the appearance there, that one could be engaged in the first reasoning, but that he is warned that such reasoning is false: "This cannot be done, but let him say within himself ... ", whereupon follows meditation II. But there is no question there of one person, but of two, of I., the separated, II., the conjoined. The rejecter will never accept meditation II, because that can only be accepted in a life following the Doctrine; and the follower will never fall into the falsity of meditation I., for thereby he would lose the Life in his life. Meditation I. is not only a fault of thinking, but especially a fault of life, and an irreparable one. To appearance an imaginary fault of thinking is there brought forward, in order the better to show, from the opposite, what is the right thinking. But a separation is here made between the goats and the sheep, between those on the left hand and those on the right hand; and in the affection of the words we clearly see with whom the Lord inflows out of the good of love and of charity, and with whom He does not. The nature of the false things of faults of thinking can be seen only with and by a life following the Doctrine.

Not the followers, but the rejecters will now ask: "But what then is life, to reject life and to live a life following the Doctrine"? at the same time standing ready with the best of definitions. To begin with, to live a life following the Doctrine is so much, so everything, that one of middling understanding but who had lived following the command­ments, after death was seen elevated among the highest Angels as one of them in wisdom. Now anyone may deem that to live a life following the commandments or the Doctrine is comparatively not so difficult, and possible for almost everyone, and particularly so for the rejecters. Merely a matter of continuous clipping, of steady fitting in. But in "living a life following the Doctrine" infinite arcana are hidden, so infinite that like those of regeneration they might be termed inexhaustible into the eternal. How gross in this respect our ideas are would appear from the vain effort to wish to compare our self° 7examination before the Holy Supper with the examination the Angels institute with the newcomers - both examinations as to the "life followed". We very soon consider the slightest fitting

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in a full application, and if that were not so, how brokenly, how beaten down would we approach to the Holy Supper, with what deepest humiliation would we partake, how immeasurably overwhelmed would we come away. How many worthily accept the Grace? How few the Mercy in deepest humiliation! By the self-examination before the Holy Supper it may in some measure be perceived what "a life following the Doctrine" should be. The Doctrine or the understanding of the Word is called a candle. A candle has three things: the flame, the wick, and the wax. In the flame it burns, by the wick it burns, from the wax it burns. Not one of these three things can be lacking, each of these three things of the Doctrinal Candle, spiritual from celestial origin, is from the Lord; the flame, the plaited threads of the wick, and the bees' wax. They who reject the life take away from the wick the wax from which the flame lives and is fed, and surround the now stolen wick with the tallow of their proprium. The effect to outward appearance is the same, the flame is of about the same heat, the brightness about as strong; but the one is wax-light, clear, pure, steady, the other tallow-light, smoky, greasy, flickering. But this only for him who sees from within. The rejecter from without, from the proprium, brings forward ever more fuel; the follower knows the light is fed from within, and that the Lord provides. His sole care full of love and life is that his slender burning wax-candle remain unspoiled before and from the Lord, pure from heterogeneous materials, untouched by draughts that make it flicker and drip. In the follower the Lord provides Himself with wax, but the rejecter provides himself with any desirable tallow from his proprium. The wax-light shines on other things than does the tallow-gleam. Other things enter in by the waxight than by the tallow-light. The rejecter agrees with the follower that the Lord is the Same with all, and that it is the receptions that differ. But in this word "reception" a deep arcanum is hidden. The Latin word for "reception" is receptio, which is really a regrasping, retaking. If we hold to this distinction and now read in CONCERNING THE SACRED SRIPTURE FROM EXPERIENCE, n. 8: "The Lord flows in with the Angel and with the man of the Church out of the good of love and of charity; the Angel and the man of the Church RECIPIT (that is, regrasps, retakes) the

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Lord, who is in the good of love and of charity, in the truths of Doctrine and of faith with himself out of the Word; thence there is the conjunction which is called the celestial marriage". Now the practically worn out words receive and reception take on an awful sense. A sense that touches life, every one's life and every kind of life. For the rejecters as well as the followers can alike be in the truths of the Doctrine and of faith out of the Word; let us assume so for a moment. But consider: the Lord inflows with the Angel and with the man of the Church out of the good of love and of charity. He who receives the Lord, does not accept Him, but recipit, that is, regrasps Him. Him who was there already, and thus had already been accepted, for He who, or that which, inflowed was there already before the receptio. Where, therefore, the re-ceptio is, there is life, and it is life. In art statements of masters are known which prove they already had a perception of this truth of life, a confession that they had not made, not sought the things, but had found them in themselves, that is re-ceptus, retaken or regrasped. What they created, they acknowledged to have been there, before it was there. 'With them there is no question of mere coincidences. The simple follower believes this simply; the rejecter agrees to an acceptance, a taking on, a taking over, but the fundamental meaning of re-ceptio must frighten him off, for it is in conflict with his free concept of the free choice. If the Lord inflows, and man recipit, it then appears that the inflowing of the Lord is the all of all things, for

the in flowing is the Lord's;

the good of love and of charity is the Lord's;

the truths of Doctrine and of faith with him out of the Word are the Lord's;

the recipere is the Lord's;

and the conjunction is the Lord's.

To be in that is to "live a life following the Doctrine"; this IS the life which the rejecters reject. In this it is that the followers are soft as wax, and the rejecters a lump of tallow. In this it is that the followers never take up (receive) any more and anything else, than what is truly a recipere. We are taught that a perceptio, a perception, is there where the external things correspond to the internal and communicate. The follower does not live except out of

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His perceptions, which are also receptions. To live a life following the Doctrine for him is to keep the perceptions pure by having the external things, all of them, none excepted, continually ordered from the Lord, following the internal. His care for this constitutes his life, his life following the Doctrine. It will appear to the rejecter that this will cost quite some sacrifices, quite some "mortifications" as the roman-catholics say. But this again is argued from the proprium, from an entirely different life that knows only of fittings in. And now for the first time the true signification of applying appears: it is the Lord's Life, regrasped, which applies itself to the Doctrine, the same to the same from the same origin. To follow here is to wave *, the will from the Lord waves together with the understanding from the Lord, the man is in the love of the wisdom, in the blessedness of conjunction "which is called the celestial marriage". If we had known that man of middling understanding, but who lived a life following the Commandments, and also a super-ingenious rejecter, would we have seen the great distinction? In what may have consisted the life of that middling man? In a quiet, hidden application, in having been faithful over little ­but this with a faithfulness, a confidence, so simple, pure, and great, that his life beside that of the rejecter would have appeared as simple, saturnine, fearsome, self-contained, monotonous, cold, and dull. For, in general, said with the lips, the "shunning of sins as sins against the Lord", is easily done; but if the kingdom of God is thought of as inside the man, and the Lord is not viewed as being above the proprium in worldly aspect, but in the things that lie within waiting there for the recipere, then not-sinning becomes a well nigh superhuman lifetask, crowned only in the rarest instances. Then faithfulness is interrelated with being married **, and is full of infinite conjugial fear. None of those things possible with the rejecter are possible with the follower. They can speak together, but as two of

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* To follow in Dutch is volgen, and to wave is golven; this cannot be rendered in English. (ED.)

** The Dutch word for being married, "getrouwd zijn", is from the same root as the word for faithfulness, ''trouw''; the full meaning of this sentence therefore. cannot be rendered in English. (ED.)

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whom one hates the other. It is clear that the rejecter conceives of the evil things as sins against God in an entirely different way from the follower. For him who rejects the life following the Doctrine there is really nothing to be shunned. A life outside the life following the Doctrine is a life of the proprium, and the proprium fears only the loss of name and profit. The sins against the Lord which, in the evil things, the follower shuns, are insults committed against the life following the Doctrine, for he clearly perceives that this "life following the Doctrine" is his no more than is the Lord's influx into it. This life is one of following the Life which is the Lord, as the Doctrine of the Church is following the infinite Divine Doctrine. The follower feels even into the body that the life following the Doctrine is unassailable, and for him the "thou shalt not ... " is given an entirely new sense: in the life following the Doctrine he will not sin, for that life is as particularly protected by Providence as is the embryo in the womb over which we read that a particular Providence watches. He carries a life in him which in appearance is his, which in appearance he must protect against evil things, but which is the Lord's and is led from the Lord, well disposed, prosperous, happy, because it is yielding willingly, altogether, and fully, as the secondary significations of following indicate. "Against God" for him is against the influx of the Lord from the good of love and of charity, which influx the rejecter inverts and thus never regrasps, never applies, for he has nothing to apply, having rejected the life following the Doctrine. What is rejecting the life other than going direct to the Father out of the proprium? There sinning "against God" loses its sense, for the proprium cannot do otherwise. For the rejecter the Commandments stand in the imperative, for the follower in a blessed negative future tense. They promise him the state of the saints.

The rejecter takes up what he may, where he may, the follower recipit what is the Lord's with him. With the rejecter everything is dead and old, with the follower everything is living and new. In apparently the same things the one finds death, the other life. How dead all words and ideas become for those who reject life, and how living and new for those who live a life following the Doctrine, perhaps nowhere so clearly appears as in the

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taking up and the fitting in of the expression "to read the Word holily, to have it holy" with the rejecters, and in the regrasping and the application thereof with the fol­lowers. "To read the Word holily" - let us be honest ­for most people has become a commonplace, something so familiar that their lips readily pronounce it as a matter of course without their giving it any particular thought. The rejecters will indignantly deny this, but the fol­lowers will he sadly silent at that indignation with a feeling of shame akin to compassion. For, what else is it that is generally understood by to read holily and to have holy ("to have holy", sanctum habere, for the first time indeed enters into our language, as a lost and now regrasped word), than an external attitude, an amalgamation of what is roman catholic solemn, protestant stiff, jewish traditional? Meanwhile holy is most closely related to "living a life following the Doctrine". The Latin words sanctus and sacer just as secundum come from sequor, and their sanscrit root sak means to follow, to honour. To read holily therefore means to read while following, to read with a life following the Doctrine, which must be something entirely different from the "holy" reading with a rejected life. Our Dutch heilig (holy) again is connected with heel (whole) [old English halig and hal], thus with the Greek secondary meanings of "following": altogether and fully. For the rejecters the holy is only on the outside, for the followers entirely from within. Is it not overwhelming that in the word sanctus, holy, the following and the honouring lie enclosed, a following with the life that for the first time truly is an hononring? Now for the rejecter "to read holily" is a worn down type, for the follower an inexhaustible word that begins to live in him more and more, within the radius of which light ever more real human things enter his life. The holy reading by the rejecter projects night­birds only on the wall.

For the rejecter everything is of importance, except that life over which the follower watches. Not to live a life following the Doctrine is the same as saying to the Lord: "We have Abraham for a father", for it means having things of doctrine and faith, but admitting no flowing in of the Lord and not being willing for any recipere. Recipere tbe Lord is to allow the Lord to give Eternal Life to the

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Truths of Doctrine and of faith with man out of the Word, and to make a dwelling therein. Just as the Lord cannot dwell with man except in what is His, just so man from himself cannot take up anything but the human. Now rejecting life is nothing else than taking the reception naturally and effecting a fitting in, not knowing that the receiving is a receptio, and that also the application is altogether and fully the Lord's. And, curiously enough, of rejection the same may be said from the opposite, as of regrasping. For if the receiving, re-cipere, thus seen, is a willing regrasping of that which man already has in him from the Lord, of that which from the Lord already is in man, over against that, rejecting, re-jicere, thus seen, is an unwilling throwing back of that which man should have in him from the Lord, of that which from the Lord should be in man. This makes clear that it is the follower who has and to whom will be given, and that it is the rejecter who has not and from whom will be taken that what he fancied he possessed. Clear also that the rejecter not only does not live a life following the Doctrine, but also persecutes and pursues it.

By "living a life following the Doctrine" the larger and smaller society will have to change completely. This has already been pointed out in speaking of "the interior dwelling"*. For the interior dwelling is only there where a life is lived following the Doctrine; there only is an essential meeting, from place to place, and not only a presence in aspect. For the sake and on behalf of that interior dwelling the exterior dwelling should be so cleansed and ordered that it already fully answers the natural idea that most people must have of the interior dwelling - the exterior dwelling also being interiorly seen, that is, not as a domicile but as civil decency and good manners, newly inspired out of the life following the Doctrine; for that life must reform everything, literally everything, even to ultimates and lowest things, into the smallest diversions, which thus also ... become purely the Lord's. For if Providence watches over the smallest momentof life, the smallest moment of life should be receptible, regraspable. This the rejector will be most fierce in opposing: "mine at

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• Adress by H. D. G. Groeneveld, see above p. 17.

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least the diversions.” No, these too will have at some time to participate in the celestial blessedness, fully taken up into, regrasped in a life following the Doctrine. One day the state of the Church spontaneously applied will livingly mirror itself in the state of society and in the least, the very least things thereof. Then society will be a Man in the spirit, living alone and safely in that spirit of life that can truly be called "sphere", truly "sociable"; for there are two kinds of sociableness: this, and any other. For a time we must content ourselves with a multitude of artificial fittings in, but we must not regard them as signs of progress, as signs of "life". The true life of the Church is in the application from within, in the life of everyone following the Doctrine, of all together and of each one, in the life from the Lord. The Church as Man and man as Church is the receptacle in which the Lord is in what is His, receptus, regrasped. That regrasping is the conjunction, the reconjunction, the Religion, the True living Christian Religion.

What is the importance and the use of a consideration such as this on life following the Doctrine? Rather might one ask: what is the danger and the disadvantage? For in all things that touch the life, whether direct or indirect, very ugly things come to light, the uglier the more the love of self and of the world within them have been sugar-coated. For, of course, we all of us have nothing of the rejecter and everything of the follower. We all live a life following the Doctrine, be it in a greater or smaller measure (as if there were a greater or smaller measure in living a life "following the Doctrine"). And thereby we vulgarize the word "life following the Doctrine" to a familiar term, to a commonplace, as the words "to read holily" or “interior dwelling"; thereby we henceforth take the word into our mouths easily and untouched, while we ought to enter into this worn full of silent awe, as something a thousand times greater than we. Whoever in the least begins to realize the meaning of "a life following the Doctrine", of "reading holily", overwhelmed and breathless, asks of himself: "Who then can be saved?" Upon which follows the Lord's answer: "With man this is not possible, but with God alone". But we generally do not let it get

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so far, we content ourselves with passing off every thought concerning a "life following the Doctrine" as being nothing new, as something which from the beginning was over well known to the members of the New Church and which we can therefore hastily pass over. Instead of a living acquisition, the word becomes just one more lifeless, hardened idea, and, however paradoxical it may sound, an accepted rejected something, the characteristic of all vulgarization; for vulgarizing is nothing else than depriving something of its living contents and making it common, thus rejecting the contents and not accepting the form otherwise than deformed according to the proprium. Doing thus, the evil and false in ourselves, the rejecter in us, can make itself master of such words as reading holily, living a life following the Doctrine, the interior dwelling, and fit them in according to and for the sake of the form. There lie the danger and the disadvantage of all misunderstood progress of Doctrine ­- the immediate vulgarization, the forerunner of all profanation and soon equally horrible. The danger and the disadvantage of form-alone, of ever more forms-alone. The damnable faith-alone consists of nothing but that. The importance and the use, however, of every consideration of a life following the Doctrine are so preponderant for every well understood progress of Doctrine, that it finally learns to overlook the inevitable danger and disadvantage, remembering the words: "Let the dead bury the dead". The importance of every such testimony is: To ever more clearly understand that every progress of Doctrine is altogether and fully dependent on a life following the Doctrine. The "use is every self-examination enlightened by Doctrine and consequent repentance. For, as in a certain light of wisdom we see that the Lord is in the Doctrine of genuine truth, yea, that the Lord is that Doctrine, even so we learn with fear, in the measure in which from the Lord we turn ourselves to the love of that wisdom, to realize that the Lord is in the life following the Doctrine, yea that the Lord is that life. Our tender care then becomes serving that life in everything and not letting it go short of anything. And we get so far as to be able to see that Doctrine in the life following the Doctrine is in its fulness, in its holiness, in its power. "To the Angels more than to any others the appearance is given

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as if they lived out of themselves with ineffable felicity", A.C. "1735. The greater the innocence, the greater the appearance. (The rejecter would sooner expect that the more wisdom a man possesses, the fewer appearances he is in). That appearance in other words is called the celestial Proprium. Now to live a life following the Doctrine is to be in an unassailable innocence from the Lord, with the blessedness of the appearance of living as if from one's self increasing into the infinite. In short, "living a life following the Doctrine" is being gifted with the celestial Proprium. For where else will this celestial Proprium dwell than in what is the Lord's with man and Angel, in the Church and in Heaven? Where else than in the life following the Word? And so the Celestial Doctrine is not conceivable without this second like unto it: the celestial life - "perfect, even as your Father, who is in the Heavens, is perfect", Matth. V : 48.

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DE HEMELSCHE LEER

EXTRACT FROM THE ISSUE FOR APRIL 1935

TO LIVE A LIFE FOLLOWING THE DOCTRINE

BY ANTON ZELLING.

A.C.3652.      

II

In another way:

There are two things: The life of the Doctrine, and the life following the Doctrine. In "the life of the Doctrine", the Lord is the Doctrine; in "the life following the Doctrine", the Doctrine is the Neighbour. In essence the same, but with a distinctive accent. Just as in Dutch there are two words for "wheel", rad" and “wiel", meaning the same, but with a distinction. In the word "rod" the stress is on the spokes - whence "molenrad" (mill-wheel); in the word "wiel" the stress is on the encompassing rim ­whence "vliegwiel" (fly-wheel). In the life of the Doctrine the thought might be of a wheel of rays out of a golden sun-axis, in life following the Doctrine, of the will regarded as the circumference of the wheel. The life of the Doctrine goes forth, the life following the Doctrine returns. Only in the unity of both is the VERA CHRISTIANA RELIGIO, the Coming in the Second Coming, fulfilled. For the "Second Advent" - Adventus Secundus - might also be understood as "Following [according to] the Coming": there is no taking up, no receptio, of the Lord's Second Coming except following the taking up, the receptio, of each Coming

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of the Lord. A taking up, a receptio, in will and understanding, with the life, with the inmost of that life; the proprium. What is the proprium? A question in which lies the Lord's question: "Peter, lovest thou Me?" and, like that sad question, to be thrice repeated: What is the proprium?

The Latin word proprium is - But let it first be settled once and for all, that it is the Doctrine which should shed its light upon the etymology, and not vice-versa, which would be an example of the imaginary physical influx. For, the Word dwells in the word in, its own, spiritual out of a celestial origin. "Once a flower was opened before the Angels as to its interiors, which are called spiritual, and when they saw they said that there was within as it were a whole paradise, consisting of indescribable things", SACR. SCRIPT. FROM Exp. 19. That flower is every word opened out of the Word, letter by letter as a botanical wonder of sense in form; as a form a natural thing, as a natural thing an effect out of spiritual things, and the spiritual things the effects out of the celestial things. Thus seen, etymology too, becomes an ancilla Doctrinae, a handmaid of the Doctrine, confirming what the word itself says: the etymos logos, that is, the true, genuine, thus original word, in short, the interior sense of the word: "as it were a whole paradise consisting of indescribable things". Now the Latin word proprium is in all probability contracted from pro-privo, that is, "for one's own" or "as one's own"; while privus is connected with our “vrij" (free); in which word "vrij" there are etymologically involved the ideas of will desire, dear, loved (whence the Dutch words "vriend" and "vrijen" for "friend" and "to woo"), to favour, to make beautiful, analogous to the Latin for free, liber. of which the sanscrit-root lub-dhas means "desirous" (whence libido, voluptuousness). In the Dutch word "heteigene" (the proprium, literally "the own") two intergrown ideas can be indicated, that of to possess and that of to owe (still clearly traceable in the English: to own and to owe), Surrounded by the clear and warm light of the Doctrine we now see the word proprium, "the own" spring open like a flower-bud: that which man possesses for or as his own, free according to his will, wish, and desire; but which nevertheless he owes and remains owing to the Lord. That

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pro in pro-prium, for or as, signifies the appearance as if it were man's, just as in the word own the appearance of the self-possession constitutes the external of that word, and the essence of the indebtedness the internal. Etymologically, that is, taken as to the true sense of the word, the proprium means: That which in appearance is man's, but in essence the Lord's. We now in this etymology enlightened by the Doctrine clearly see TWO propriums designating themselves, which may be called the "indebted proprium" and the possessive proprium"; the one being of Heaven, the other of hell. Wherever in the Word Heaven and hell are mentioned, Heaven refers to the proprium in man indebted to the Lord, and hell to man's possessive proprium; Heaven to the innocence in him, hell to his guilt; for to acknowledge indebtedness is from the Innocence of the Lord to appropriate to one's self, to be in the innocence of Heaven; but the denying of the indebtedness is the disowning in the proprium of the Innocence of the Lord, and therefore to be in guilt, in the guilt and indebtedness of hell.

From the letter of the Word we have learned to see with a rational that man's proprium "from birth is nothing but evil and false", but to see with a rational is by no means yet to perceive with the voluntary. The Lord's Coming had for its end the subjugation of the hells and the ordering of the Heavens. Without these two Works of Divine Mercy the Second Coming wonld not be conceivable, for the Second Coming is following the Coming. With reference to man the Corning of the Lord is a subjugation of the possessive proprium and an ordering of the indebted proprium. For as long as the possessive proprium from its hells rises up against the indebted proprium in its Heavens, this latter is under constraint and out of its order. In the six days or periods of the story of creation, the states of man's regeneration following one another, have been described, and the second state, the status secundus is "when a distinction is being made between the things which are of the Lord, and those which are proper to man", A. C. 8, which state is followed by the repentance of the third state. The things that are the Lord's in the Word are called remains. reliquiae in the Latin, literally:

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things left back, things which remain behind. Undoubtedly, man's own things make his possessive proprium; the Lord's things, left behind in him as reliquiae the proprium indebted to the Lord: and in the ARCANA COELESTlA, n. 13, we read that in the regeneration out of this indebted own, the greater part, at this day, come only to the first state; "some only to the second; some to the third, fourth, fifth; seldom to the sixth; and scarcely anyone to the seventh".

What then is, be it asked once more, the proprium?

What do Peter's tears signify at the thrice repeated question: Lovest thou Me?

In a sense we might even speak of three propriums: ,

I. the proprium in itself, which is purely the Lord's, and which in man

II. either shines forth as the indebted, or

III. hides away behind the possessive.

This would make clear that the Lord does not break or extinguish our evil and false things, but bends them. For, just as the evil and false is a perverted good and true, the possessive is the indebted of the same proprium perverted. Reformation and regeneration have no other meaning than turning the Lord's proprium in man from the possessive to the indebted, which is such an enormous work that we read that at this day scarcely anyone reaches the seventh state, and further that the work of regeneration even in the highest Heavens is not completed into eternity. This at the same time gives an image of the most direful temptations the Lord went through in the complete glorification of His Human, and we read in D.L.W. n. 221:

"That the Lord came into the world, and took upon Himself (sus-ceperit, not receperit) the Human, in order to put Himself into the power of subjugating the hells. and of reducing (red-igendi) all things to order both in the Heavens and in the lands. This Human He put on over His former Human. The Human which He put on in the world, was as the Human of a man in the world, yet both Divine, and thence infinitely transcending the finite humans of Angels and men". His former Human is the Human Divine Proprium of the Father Himself, the Human of man is the indebted Divine Human Proprium of the Son; and the possessive human proprium is the maternal from

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Mary which the Lord put off entirely. Thus seen, the Lord's Glorification is the conjunction of the Lord's Propriums, of which the regeneration of the proprium in man is an image.

It is following the progress of the Doctrine that this question of life arises, for if the Doctrine is not immediately followed by a life following the Doctrine, the life of the Doctrine remains spiritual, outside the body of the Church, it draws back, and its after-effects are cerebral only. It is a compelling necessity out of the Doctrine to see those two propriums in order that the infernal one may be subjugated and that which is the Lord's be put in order and become celestial -- from the Lord. No Second Coming but following this Coming.

Man's proprium is entirely evil and false, Inversely it might be said, that the evil and the false is man's proprium, for therein it is as in its subject. That shunning evils means shunning the possessive proprium, taken merely doctrinally, in a purely abstract way, is quite clear; but between the possessive proprium and the indebted proprium, if no Coming of the Lord is admitted, without subjugation on the one side and a putting in order on the other, in a word, without separation, a mixing up is possible of good and evil, true and false; first a rendering vague of the borders, then a vulgarization, and finally a profanation. For what is the Lord's and what is man's, what is inherent in the indebted proprium and what is inherent in the possessive proprium, are continually opposed the one to the other, and if we do not continually allow the Lord to wrestle in our temptations and to conquer, if we do not immediately obey His command: Follow Me, and have this followed by the second command: Let the dead bury the dead, Matth. VIII: 22, the possessive proprium has the mastery over the indebted proprium: the tears of Peter.

The evil and false of the possessive proprium is the perverted good and true of the indebted proprium, and because in that perversion are contained its will, wish, desire, favouring, and beautifying, the possessive proprium makes its evil and false appear as good and true to such an extent that it lets its evil and false pass among the good and true of the indebted proprium as if they were alike, as false prophets coming in sheep's clothing, but inwardly

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they are ravening wolves, Matth. VII : 15. So it happens that we in ourselves, alone and in society, and in others in the church and the world, find so many things that are good, lovable, precious, hearty, warm, spontaneous, delightful, noble, great, true, pretty, beautiful, agreeable, spirited, fine and what not, and nevertheless they are such only as to the appearance of the possessive proprium. Does not the passage in RATIONAL PSYCHOLOGY, XXXI refer to this: "[It appears] that insanity is wisdom, fallacy truth, the becoming and the unbecoming honesty, vice virtue; license free choice, pleasures and the allurements of the senses the highest felicity and the highest good. That art appears more ingenious than nature; that philosophers are possessed of a better common sense than the plebeians; that they are wise who talk more elegantly and are skilled in languages and mingle their sharper wittiness, or they who keep silent or bring forth half the sense of what is to be understood; that we are to esteem those who are esteemed by others whom we believe to be possessed of judgment; infinite other things occur in the disquisition of the true and the false, the good and the evil, the beautiful and the becoming. The discriminations themselves, which do not appear before the senses, we believe to be naught so long as they are concealed, although they are infinite, and the figure rather gross and unequal. So in other things". We put in italics: "in the disquisition", perceiving that what is meant is an examination guided from the Lord, starting from love for the truth for the sake of truth; for the appearances there mentioned are just those of which the possessive proprium certainly never tolerates any examination, or only a falsified one.

But let us give a striking example of a subjugated possessive proprium and of a well-ordered indebted proprium.

In the so-called JOURNAL OF DREAMS, n. 76, 77, Emanuel Swedenborg wrote: "I heard a person at the table asking his neighbour the question whether anyone who had an abundance of money could be melancholic. I smiled in my mind and would have answered, if it had been proper for me to do so in that company, or if the question had been addressed to me, that a person who possesses everything in abundance, is not only subject to melancholy, but is (exposed) to a still higher kind, that of the mind and

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the soul, or of the spirit which operates therein, and I wondered that he had proposed such a question. I can testify to this so much the more, as by the grace of God there has been bestowed upon me in abundance everything that I require in respect to temporal things; I am able to live richly on my income alone, and can carry out what I have in mind, and still have a surplus of the revenue, and thus I can testify that the sorrow or melancholy which comes from the want of the necessaries of life, is of a lesser degree and merely of the body, and is not equal to the other kind. The power of the Spirit prevails in the latter, but I do not know whether it is so also in the first kind, for it seems that it may be severe on bodily grounds; still, I will not enter further into this matter".

Leaving for a moment out of consideration the subject of this meditation, we would wish to draw attention to Swedenborg's attitude, expressed in the words; "I smiled in my mind and would have answered, if it had been proper for me to do so in that society, or if the question had been addressed to me". Externally taken, a courteous attitude which every "perfect gentleman" would likewise have observed; one does not speak when one has not been introduced. Interiorly taken, however, it is the attitude of life of a humbled indebted proprium and of a subjugated possessive proprium. For how many of us would not have eagerly taken the opportunity quickly found at a table d'hote to hold a striking speech, even if for a quarter of an hour only, for the sake of reading from the eyes of all "O HOW JUST, O HOW LEARNED, O HOW WISE", T.C.R. 332, 333, 334. It would have seemed to us as if we had spoken from a good and true impulse, and had spoken the right word, and still - and still this would have been an appearance out of the possessive proprium, proud of our own pedantry and the demonstration thereof. And our feeling of self would have felt flattered with the satisfaction of having done a good work, to have stood for the truth, to have sown a little seed, and what not more. Here we have a striking example of how the possessive proprium may pose as good and true, with the truths from the indebted proprium and, not being subjugated, push forward, presumptuously occupying the place of the indebted proprium which has been put out of its order, and not be conscious of how evil and false it is! This now

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is one of the many forms in which the possessive proprium acts as disturber, as rejecter, as fitter-in, loving the uppermost rooms, the chief seats, the greetings, altogether as in the description of Matthew ch. XXIII. And now, as a contrast, notice the attitude printed above in italics, at the same time bearing in mind the so highly characteristic subject: whether possession makes melancholy! What an indebted proprium applied to life speaks therefrom, and what a subjugated possessive proprium; and yet, he who reads this Journal of Dreams sees what combats had to be humbly wrestled through from the Lord and to be suffered, to keep this possessive proprium subjugated, in order that in this life there might be the life following the Doctrine.

The proprium, whatever it is, is the Lord's, but it is given to man, Angel, and devil as his: pro privato, for or as private property. Now the delight that constitutes the inmost of this appearance, in the indebted proprium is an inexpressibly blessed feeling of gratitude; and, in the possessive proprium an excessive avidity and love of dominion. Whether possession makes melancholy, it was asked. Is this melancholy not involved in the sadness spoken of in Matthew XIX: 22: "When the young man heard that saying, he went away sorrowful: for he had great possessions". In the testimony which Swedenborg gave in the above quoted meditation we also see all of the great material possessions he enjoyed, expressly booked as a debit-item;.and because he lived entirely out of the indebted proprium he was silent at that table, because it was no society. We think also of that memorable meeting in T.C.R. n. 503: "No president was appointed ... but each one, as the desire seized him, rushed forth into the midst, and ... made public his opinion". (How characteristic too that every one there was seated at his own small altar. And their speaking testified to a thinking close to the speech). This keeping silent now was from the indebted proprium, for the possessive proprium cannot keep quiet, it must be active, of itself it must be able to shoot to the centre and to cry out, whether there is a society or not. Do we see the difference between the chaste and scrupulous indebted proprium and the unchaste and unscrupulous possessive proprium? Do we also see therefrom how much the rejecter in us transfers from the indebted to the possessive, not perceiving that thereby he transfers the living

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contents as forms-alone, as mere cognitions, mere cultures.

This concrete example is weighty with conclusions for us to draw. With a lip-confession of an evil and false proprium we too easily shirk a life following the Doctrine. In our life in the Church, alone and in company, we should let the possessive proprium be subjugated and the indebted proprium be ordered from the Lord, more and more, through all the seven states, not for our own sake but for the sake of the Lord. We should be near to one another in the indebted proprium, and remain at a distance in the possessive pro­prium. The rejecter in us, on the contrary, wishes us to be near to one another in the possessive proprium and at a distance in the indebted proprium. Thus our societies are still full of good and true, dear and cordial, warm and generous, spontaneous and enthusiastic appearances, which interiorly are nothing but evil and false, and meanwhile the Lord over and again asks of the things in our indebted proprium: Peter, lovest thou Me?

What in our lives in the face of the life following the Doctrine we ought to learn, is continually to appoint to its place in the lower earth the possessive proprium, where it could execute mean services for a piece of food, a piece of raiment, and a piece of money; entirely as in the hellish workhouses. It is of the possessive proprium that the Lord says: "For if ye love them which love you, what reward have ye? Do not even the publicans the same? And if ye salute your brethren only, what do ye more than others? Do not even the publicans so?" Matth. V: 46, 47. Our possessive proprium in its way loves cordially and is full of the most affectionate greetings. It is even willingly prepared to embrace the Doctrine and to be taught by it. It is willing to improve its life provided - it only does not, nay not in anything, lose that life. It is with this as with the love of dominion: a great love of dominion cannot but be accompanied by a great shrewdness, and it is part of that shrewdness never to show a trace of its love of dominion; it beautifies it in the shape of an Ideal- the doctrine of all tyrannic world-reformers. To carry through that ideal is nothing but to fit into everything the ambition and love of dominion: the danger of an indoctrinated proprium. What we therefore greatly need is a concrete idea in ourselves of the propriums, what they have been in the Most Ancient Church, in the

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Ancient Church, in the Hebrew, Jewish, primitive Christian, and how they will have to be in the New Church. And just as the Ancient Church had completely elaborated Doctrines of Charity, we shall also be given the indebted possession of similar Doctrines; and, however curious it sounds, amongst them there will be also a Doctrine of Society, treating of the subjugation and the ordering of the respective propriums, to such an extent that in the state of any arbitrary society the state of the Church will be mirrored altogether and fully. To this end it is necessary that every society, and in every society every individual, to use a mathematical expression, should find its greatest common measure and its least common multiple, perceiving that all that goes beyond that is from evil. In the multiple is the life of the Doctrine, in the measure the life following the Doctrine, both organically one. Therein there is no place for the possessive proprium except at the outermost periphery, and even then as it were at rest, that is, put to its "own" mean service. It is not enough with the lips to abhor "the proprium" and meanwhile to leave it its evil and false playground; it were indeed better to extend mercy also to that proprium and to perform for it a good work of charity, as for a stray dog. The possessive proprium is such a stray dog: if it is not subjugated. Once subjugated, it may become a good watch- or draught-dog, entitled to "good treatment" in its kennel; outside, not in the house. The false prophets against which the Lord warns proceed from the possessive proprium and present themselves as the indebted proprium. Our entire life following the Doctrine must guard against this under penalty of losing for ever the life of the Doctrine in us.

Our Church is the Church of the Lord's Second Coming. And promising this Second Coming following His Coming, the Lord sadly asked: When the Son of Man cometh, shall He find faith on the earth? Let us then, more and more each day, as from ourselves, take up the Life of the Doctrine with and in a life following the Doctrine, lest at some time we walk, our head high above in an appearance of doctrine, the frayed hem of our garment dragging through a filthy Jerusalem; which will happen if we leave it to our possessive proprium to freely dispose of the things of Doctrine. And the end of it would be that we, as they of the filthy Jerusalem, disap-

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pointed everywhere and yet indefatigably, would be seeking for the Messiah, thus together with the Second Coming, also making void the Coming. For the possessive proprium finally chokes up even every general influx.

We read “that man's understanding can be raised above his proper love into some light of wisdom in the love of which he is not". Well then, if by that light he does not see and is not taught "how he must live if he would come also into that love, and thus enjoy blessedness into the eternal", D.L.W. 395, it is with his possessive proprium alone that he enjoys the things of wisdom, His reward is gone, his reward and his use. He may have his moments of illuminatio (from lumen, glimmer) - in ordinary language it is said "luminous ideas" - but the true illustratio (from lux, light) is never given to him. We are taught that the Doctrine is from those who are in enlightenment; this means: from those who are in the light of wisdom with the love of that wisdom. Further it imperatively means that nothing of Doctrine ever is from those who "are above their proper love' in some light of wisdom". He who is in the love of wisdom, has the life of the Doctrine in the life following the Doctrine, dwelling in an indebted and thus innocent proprium; he perceives arcana, while the other is only solving problems, with a continually consulted rational. All discussions in doctrinal matters that cannot be settled have therefore this cause, either that both parties speak out of "a certain light", or that one is in enlightenment, and the other only in "a certain light"; the former in a life following the Doctrine, the latter outside of it. That it is necessary that there should be also the latter, is a different question; but what here and now is the principal thing is that we may no longer at any price leave the indebted and the possessive proprium for what it is, undistinguished as one dark entangled mass with "nothing but evil and false". First of all, we do not leave it for what it is, for the possessive proprium everywhere and always still plays its tricks on us far too freely; and secondly, in that way we never learn to see that the Doctrine most certainly is in-generated in the proprium, but in the indebted proprium. How otherwise could it be understood that the Most Ancients had the Word engraved in their hearts? And one more question: The judgments in the

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Apocalypse on the Angels of the Churches, do they concern the Doctrine or the life following the Doctrine? The answer is clear: who does violence to the life following the Doctrine, does violence to the life of the Doctrine. WHOSO READETH, LET HIM UNDERSTAND.

Taking the Word for the Doctrine of the Church is to enlarge and extend the possessive proprium to a rich man's land; " ... but God said unto him, Thou fool, this night thy soul shall be required of thee: then whose shall those things be, which thou hast provided"? Luke XII : 16-21. But out of the Word to receive (recipere) the Doctrine of the Church as the understanding of the Word is from the Lord to have the indebted proprium made angelic and a celestial proprium.

The life of the Doctrine in the life following the Doctrine - " I the Vine, you the branches" - is the GLORIFICATION heard in Heaven, T.C.R. 625. The six days or periods of the story of creation as the six successive states of man's regeneration have in them no other end than to come to the Glorification of that Seventh Day. Who, in this connection, re-reads the ARCANA COELESTIA, n. 6--13, will find that the advance of Regeneration is no other than that from the from one's self to the as if from one's self, a gradually stronger shining forth of the indebted proprium through the possessive proprium, until the former is made altogether angelic, the latter definitely asleep. Then love reigns.

And so the question what is the life following the Doctrine, is no other than the Lord's question: Peter, lovest thou Me?

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DE HEMELSCHE LEER

EXTRACT FROM THE ISSUE FOR JULY 1935

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THE NINETEENTH OF JUNE 1935

Address by H. D. G. Groeneveld.

We today celebrate the day of the Lord's Second Coming and of the establishment of the New Church. Are we indeed imbued with the fact for which we have come together, and does the great miracle live in us that the Lord has come again and is present in the New Church? If all affections and thoughts for that Church are not in the centre of our lives, then the celebration of this day is merely formal, a celebration therefore in which the essential, that is, the love to the Lord, is lacking. In CONJUGIAL LOVE, n. 125, we read: "It is a common saying within the Church that as the Lord is the Head of the Church, so the husband is of the wife; from which it would follow that the husband represents the Lord, and the wife the Church. But the Lord is the Head of the Church, and the man (homo), a man (vir) and a woman, are a Church; and still more a husband and a wife together"; and in n. 63: "The conjunction of good and truth is the Church". It thus appears from this that we are in the Church only then when both provinces of the mind, that is the intellectual and the voluntary, are conjoined with the Church. Neither where the intellectual is alone, nor where the voluntary is alone, but there where they are one, is the Church.

In the CANONS we read: "The soul of the offspring is out of the father, and in the womb it clothes itself with a body out of the substance of the mother; analogically as seed in the earth and out of the substance of the earth", CANONS, Concerning the Lord Saviour, IX : 1. Now since the intellectual is the province of the man and the voluntary the province of the woman, it is therefore out of the intellectual that the soul of the Church is and out of the voluntary that the body of the Church is formed. It is to the intellectual that the Lord, by the conjunction of the intellectual and the

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voluntary in the former state, has given admittance to the more interior provinces of His Word given to the New Church. Numerous are the truths given to the Church, by which the Church has the light on the way that leads it to a more interior life in the Lord. It is this light that is meant by the light in the first chapter of the Gospel of John, where we read in verses 9-12: "That was the true light, which lighteth every man that cometh into the world. He was in the world, and the world was made by Him, and the world knew Him not. He came unto His own, and His own received Him not. But as many as received Him, to them gave He power to become the sons of God, even to them that believe on His name".

In the state in which the Church now is this light threatens to disappear in the night of the voluntary province of the Church. By the light of the intellectual the evil and false of the voluntary of the natural mind comes into view. The genuine intellectual sees the impurity of this mind and guards against any conjunction therewith, since thereby it would lose its strength and its power. All affections of the voluntary of the natural mind are directed towards itself and the world. They rule in this mind and desire no guidance of the intellectual in the orderly principles of this mind. All reverence and humility disappear, and the holy sphere of divine worship is soiled by the impurities of the voluntary of the natural mind. This mind enters the Church with clumsy feet. Every feeling of coming on holy ground is absent, whilst actions and attitudes, the singing and the recitations, do not testify to the presence of the Lord in the Church. The affections in this mind draw the intellectual things into its province, as a consequence of which the light disappears. The truths lose their essence and this mind plays with the forms thereof. Hearken and see, how they play with the word "charity". Every member of the Church should in intercourse have a holy fear of taking this word into the mouth, for charity is the Lord's. Only in states in which the internal mind expresses itself, should this word as a glory leave his lips. Hearken and see, how they deal with the natural, the rational, and the spiritual things of the Church, whilst every internal to these things is lacking. Let us wash and cleanse ourselves of these things, lest the genuine intellectual throw these

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things out of the Church, as the Lord cleansed the temple, of which we read the following in verses 13-16 of the second chapter of the Gospel of John: "And the Jews' passover was at hand, and Jesus went up to Jerusalem, and found in the temple those that sold oxen and sheep and doves, and the changers of money sitting, And when He had made a scourge of small cords, He drove them all out of the temple, and the sheep and the oxen, and poured out the changers' money, and overthrew the tables; and said unto them that sold doves: Take these things hence; make not My Father's house an house of merchandise". Let us draw near to one another and let us be together with a holy fear for the things of the Church, and let us communicate one to the other the things of the Lord that from the internal mind have come to our consciousness.

While in the former state the essential of the Church depended on the opening of the intellectual of the Church, the Church's salvation now depends on the opening of the voluntary of the Church. It is the new voluntary alone that can form the body for the intellectual. The intellectual longs for this new voluntary as for its bride and it is with it alone, as with its wife, that the intellectual can live in glory in its dwelling.

While in the former state it thus was the male, it now is the female that is called to its function in the Church. For this it is necessary for the voluntary of the natural mind to raise itself above the affections in which it is now bound. See how this mind adheres to the body, to clothing, to the family, to nature. From these affections this mind draws the intellectual towards it and soils it with its impurities. Women know how they rule in men's intellectual will. May the voluntary of the natural mind depart from these things, in order that the will be guided by the intellectual of the Church, and the pure affections from the Lord may rule in the intellectual will of the Church. In CONJUGIAL LOVE, n. 165, the following with reference thereto has been revealed to us:

"That the conjunction of the wife with the rational wisdom of the man is from within, is because this wisdom is proper to the understanding of men, and ascends into a light in which women are not, which is the reason why women do not speak out of that wisdom; but in the company of men when such matters are discussed, are silent and only listen. That

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nevertheless such things are with wives from within is manifest from their listening, that they inwardly recognize them, and favour what they hear and have heard from their husbands. But that the conjunction of a wife with the moral wisdom of men is from without, is because the virtues of that wisdom for the most part are akin to similar ones with women, and draw from the intellectual will of the man, wherewith the will of the wife unites itself, and makes a marriage. And because the wife knows these virtues with a man better than the man knows them with himself, it is said that the conjunction of the wife with those is from without"; and in n. 166: "That wives know the affections of their husbands, and that they prudently moderate them, is also among the arcana of conjugial love stored up with wives.”

Then shall be the body of the Church, and the intellectual will love the voluntary. Then the voluntary will bear sons and daughters to the Church, to the glorification of the Lord and of His Church.

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DE HEMELSCHE LEER

EXTRACTS FROM THE ISSUE FOR AUGUST 1935

TO LIVE A LIFE FOLLOWING THE DOCTRINE

BY ANTON ZELLING
 

III

A. C. 9297.

The theoretical refers to the intellectual, theory being derived from theorein: to regard, to see, to understand, but also: to assist at a festival; and indeed, for in such a state is the intellectual mind, when, withdrawn from worldly and earthly things, it is lost in the contemplation of the celestial and spiritual things concerning the Glorification and the Regeneration.

The practical refers to the voluntary, practice being derived from prassein: to do, to act, to fulfill, to attain, to acquire, to have in view. In ancient times action and will were one, and consequently the good practical is so entirely and completely following the true theoretical that the Greek verb prassein besides to execute, to perform, to work, and to intend, also means to walk, to go, to pass through, to travel a road, to succeed; thus here in other words: with good results to follow the way of the theoretically true.

In the highest sense the practical follows the theoretical as Regeneration is following the Glorification; for to follow is to be so conjoined with the Lord as the Lord in respect of the Human Essence is conjoined with Jehovah - "this alone is to follow Him", A. C. 1737. And to be conjoined with the Lord is to be conjoined with Him in the internal understanding of the Word. The word verstand [understanding] indicates a marriage, the marriage of the rational

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and the free, both in the understanding having come to a stand, to a position, to an attitude and a relation; for verstand [understanding] means to have come to a stand or to a standing; and that verstand [understanding] in essence is a state of houding and verhouding [attitude and relation] is proved by the Dutch word verstandhouding [to be on good "understanding" with some one]" being virtually a tautology. *

In the relative sense the practical is following the theoretical, as the truths of life are following the truths of faith, and in that respect the Prologue to the CANONS OF THE NEW CHURCH concludes with this trumpet-blast full of judgment: "In the degree in which the truths of life become of life, in that degree the truths of faith become of faith, and not the least more or less".

AND NOT THE LEAST MORE OR LESS. Out of this word, as a Cherub covering the CANONS with his wings, it stands forth hard as a rock, not only that the Doctrine of genuine Truth cannot exist without a life following it, but also that no life which is "more or less" according to Doctrine can exist. For this not the least more or less means : Just as in the Lord there is not more of Love than of Wisdom, and not more of Wisdom than of Love, and any excess would perish, just so in man there should be not more of doctrine than of life, and not more of life than of doctrine, for anything which herein exceeds an equal measure, is from evil. This not the least more or less also enables us to perceive why the Sun of the spiritual world appears at a medium height; also to perceive the ancient wisdom that has come down to us in the saying "the golden mean.” Yea, it enables us also to understand what interiorly is meant by his being a man of middling understanding, in that Memorable Relation concerning a man who, having lived following the Decalogue, became equal to the highest Angels· in wisdom, namely that in this understanding all things kept a pure mean, where nothing strove to excel above the rest or above another, thus to be the most, the first, the greatest, In one word: this not the least

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* Here and in several other places of this and the previous articles by Mr. ZeIling there occur passages of an etymological nature of great interest, which it is, of course, not possible to render in a direct translation. (Ed.).

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more or less unfolds the internal sense of the Lord's words: “He that is least among you all, the same shall be great”, Luke IX : 48; for the least is he in whom nothing excels for the sake of himself and the world at the expense of the Lord and the neighbour; thus with whom all things have been put in order from the only Lord out of His Infinite Mercy which that man, as the least, with the deepest humiliation acknowledges most of all.

It is of awful significance that the CANONS, the rules of conduct, OF THE NEW CHURCH are immediately preceded by this "not the least more or less" - as if this word, a double-edged sword, served as a measuring-rod in setting out the rigid rules of conduct. The Lord has not been glorified more or less, and man's regeneration is not more or less an image of the Lord's Glorification. Blasphemous as it would be to say so, it will to the same extent obscure all meaning not to accept the life following the Doctrine entirely and fully with the whole heart, with the whole soul, and with the whole understanding. As a proof the following quotations from the CANONS, The Lord Saviour, VI : 3 and 8, may serve: .

N. 3: "The Lord, when He was in a state of exaninition, or of humiliation, prayed to the Father as though absent or remote; and when He was in a state of glorification, or unition, He spoke with Himself, when with the Father; ALTOGETHER as with man there are states of the soul and body, before and after regeneration".

N. 8: [After the Lord's temptation separately in the Divine Truth has been spoken of, and His inassailability in the Divine Good when conjoined] "The same takes place with the man who is regenerated from the Lord".

In the case of all those with whom the truths of life have not come to belong to the life, both truths italicized above must belong to the scientifics and not to faith; what then with them may properly belong to the living faith? For it has there been openly announced: Nowhere but in the very life of following (to be regenerated is to allow of being regenerated, and to allow is to follow), can the Lord's Glorification be perceived and experienced in life; the perception of the truths of faith having become faith from the experience in life of the truths of life having become life. Perception in the experience in life, the

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theoretical in the practical, behold here the Regeneration in its victorious advance, in its prassein.

Before treating further of "truths of life", let us first more closely consider the word "to follow", out of the Word and out of the language. Out of the language. The Science of Correspondences in ancient times was the science of sciences. Let us understand well that Hebrew superlative: not the uppermost science, but the inmost, the science which is the foundation of, and the one ruling in all the others, the first and the last, their centre and circumference, that which made each science have communion with all the others. The future doctrinal etymology will be rooted in that reborn Science of Correspondences, and therein in its way again be a science of sciences, a linguistic anatomy, astronomy, botany, chemistry, and so forth; and in the smallest tittle or jot it will see, acknowledge, and jubilantly bring forward in confirmation, an image of the Unity and Infinity of God. On a word as “to follow” it could write a volume as fascinating as voluminous, demonstrating that there are two hemispheres in the language and therein two mighty constellations, with WIL [will] for the one centre from which springs forth the all of language, and with ZIJN [to be] for the other centre around which the all of language revolves; demonstrating also how from the magic letter combination zn words shine forth as Zijn [to be], Zon [sun], Zoon [son], Zin [sense], Zien [to see], Zenden [to send]; and how from the magic letter combinations wl, vl, fl, bl, pl, and these inverted to lw, lv, lf, lb, lp, words flow forth all having relation to the will, such as wil [will], wiel [wheel], wel [well], weelde [wealth], beeld [image], vleesch [flesh], vol [full], veel [much], val [fall], bloei [bloom], plooi [pleat], and. also such words as leven [life], liefde [love], lijf [body], geloof [faith, belief], loven [to praise]. Demonstrating then how the word volgen [to follow] and its anagram. golven [to wave] flow through both hemispheres and enter into the most wonderful combinations. To take up a word such as volgen [to follow] is to stir up the universal firmament of the language and to come from one grand constellation of words to the other. Take as an example a simple combination of words such as volgorde [order of following, that is, sequence]: orde [order]

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is derived from the sanskrit ar, that is, to go, to strive upward, whence oriar, that is, to rise, oriens, the east, the morning, and in the highest sense the Lord who is Order itself; in volgorde [order of following] that Order is bound, fused into, married, with to follow so that the one part has become fully the other and of the other, for to follow is nothing but following the order, according to order; and order is nothing but a regular following up. This and a thousand other things the word to follow does in its waving through the entire language and through all languages, and such because it is full of the voluntary; and because it is full of the voluntary, of every voluntary, it constantly changes its shape and suddenly and unexpectedly turns up in quite different words. Just as it fills that word order with its life, it draws a sense from hooren [to hear] and gehoorzamen [to obey], and makes volgzaam [obsequious] render a similar sense as gehoorzamen [to obey], Latin obsequor. We have previously seen how in heilig [holy] the idea of volgen [to follow] lies involved; well then, in lezen [to read] this concept is equally involved, for the Latin, among other things, ascribes these senses to legere [to read]: to follow, to walk along, to run through, a road; to skim, shear, sail over and along a thing; to gather together, to glean, to roll up, to wind up, to overtake, to catch up, to muster, to select, to choose, to seek out, to eavesdrop, yea even to steal, (whence sacrilegus). From this it appears that also lezen [to read] is full of the voluntary and thus of what follows, so that "to read holily" really means "to follow in the spirit of following", that is to take up the Word in will and understanding. For there is also a following with one of the two, and thus with neither, that is, with an evil will and a false understanding; for which reason in Latin there are various words for followers and partisans, such as sectator and assecla, which all indicate a shade of following.

To consider the word "to follow" out of the Word is to consider the end of Creation, from the first thereof, being "man in Our image, following Our likeness" to the last thereof, being "an angelic Heaven out of the human race". For Heaven is nothing but an angelic society; and society - with which we have now approached to the core of our study -- is nothing but a royal following. For the Latin

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for society is societas, of which the root soc is also derived from sequor and means to follow. And that need not even greatly surprise us, for even our Dutch vergezellen [to accompany, to associate] means to go along with a person, to follow him, and also to share, to be accompanied by and related with, to take part; and even our Dutch word gezin [family] once signified travelling-company, retinue, royal court, surrounding, armed escort; and gesinde [servants] knights' train, courtiers, attendants, Societas, a society, is not merely an incidental multitude of people, but, as the root indicates, a multitude conjoined for an end which is generally followed; hence in ancient tunes socius could also mean husband, just as in Dutch levensgezellin signifies wife. In the world, which does not know the word out of the Word, a society is never much more than an incidental mass of people crowded together for some jointly desired advantage; but in the New Church which, out of the Word, takes up anew each word, the celestial sense of following should be given again to that word, a following of noblemen who come to court, that is, serve God. And the court is often mentioned in the Word, mostly, as in D.P. 113, in the sense of "the court of the ruling love", and there moreover followed by this awful word: "As is the king such are the ministers and the satellites".

All language and the Word are interwaved with "to follow". Secundum, following, in the Word occurs almost as often as the equivalent and in the Old Testament connecting verse to verse. And can it be otherwise? No effect except following the cause, nothing that is later except following the prior, no state except following love and wisdom, no nobility except following the King, no Church except following the Doctrine, no image except following the likeness. In David's words: "Commit thy way unto Jehovah", Psalm XXXVII: 5, there is only one exhortation:

Let us become following-Thee. We people sometimes speak about "our path of life'', but that is then a swollen term of grandiloquence, for what at most is ours, is the path straight down to hell; of a path of life we can only speak if the path of man's free choice has been turned to the way of the Lord, if that path has allowed itself to be drawn into the current of the Lord's way, and follows along and after.

It may therefore rightly be said that the word "to follow"

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follows us everywhere. The language is full of it, and in the Word there is no page, no line, where it does not occur. Let us call to mind the conclusion of the prologue to the RATIONAL PSYCHOLOGY: "Therefore, benevolous reader, if you will deign to follow me thus far, I believe that you will apperceive what is the soul. ... I would have wished that my companions should not abandon me midway". A harmonious series of shades of "following" may here be noticed: benevolous, to read, to follow, to accompany, and how all of this directs itself to the voluntary, the voluntary in man as humanity, as the human race, as human and angelic society. It is out of the voluntary that the society is a following [a court], and not until we learn well to see and to designate society as a following [a royal court], can we realize what a society must be and shall become, what it is not and what it may not remain. Not until then can we perceive that the societies of Heaven are one from good; and that if Heaven were distinguished following the true things of faith, and not following good, there would be no Heaven, because there would be nothing of unanimity. (A.C. 4837). Indeed, a distinction as to the true things of faith would make parties of the societies. And now while here considering the society, by contrasting the words "party" and "[a royal] following," we come to see the significance of the truths of life. If we take society as it is taken in the world, thus as a party, then the truths of life and life itself stand altogether outside of it. If, on the other hand, we take society in the internal sense as it is in Heaven and should be in the Church, thus as a royal following, the living connection between the truths of life and the truths of faith shines forth as a golden girdle named "Not the least more or less.” The truths of life. Life taken in this connection is the compound of all tendencies and affections going forth from the voluntary; the truths of life are those true things which continually erect and put into order all these tendencies and affections; that they must come to belong to the life signifies that the voluntary must be willing, must be willing to listen, must be willing for the cleansing and purification of its tendencies and affections, ready for the ennobling of the court of its ruling love. Those truths of life in a sense very much resemble hygienic and economic regulations; in essence their purpose is for a sound spirit to maintain a sound body. "For as much as the truths

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of life come to belong to life" means that in so much as man allows "that the influx from God who is in the midst of the theological subjects which occupy the highest region of the human mind, operates into each and every thing below as from a sun, so that speech and the cognition of Him pervades and fills all those things", CANONS, God, Summary X, Marginal Note. From this it is clear that not the taking up of the truths of faith is to follow Him, but the taking up in life of the truths of life, in such a way that a constant new voluntary forms a constant new body for the intellectual, whereupon the truths of faith are then essentially of faith and not of science. "To come to belong to life" is to come to belong to the Lord, and "to come to belong to faith" is likewise to come to belong to the Lord: and when both have become the Lord's not the least more or less, it may appear that those truths of life are similar, if not the same as the truths of faith, differing only as to the receptacles. The question now is: how does man as a family and as a society of the Church stand before the practical things of the truth of faith, before the truths of life; how does society stand before the voluntary and how can it make that into a dwelling-­place of the Lord's charity, as also the intellectual into a dwelling-place of the Lord's faith? Put in another way: what and where is the life of the Church and how are man and society to be that they may be a vessel of life?

Life is truly life only when it leads to Heaven. However, without the acknowledgment of self and the cognitions of true and good no one can be led to Heaven. (A.C. 189). Now cognitions teach how and wherein to acknowledge that self. Who there stops half-way, thus who ceases to follow, comes to confuse the proprial things and ends by calling man's what is the Lord's and the Lord's what is man's.

Just as in all things, in the proprium also there is a marriage of good and truth, which there is a marriage of the indebted and the possessive. In the indebted there is again a pair: the love of the Lord and the love of the neighbour; equally so in the possessive, these there being out of the love of self and the love of the world; which loves out of Creation are celestial loves. (D.L.W. 396.) So, when considering the relations of the indebted and the possessive in the propria of the successive Churches, two things must first be stated: I. That those two parts of the proprium are related as the

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voluntary and the intellectual. II. That in the beginning the possessive, similarly as the indebted, was celestial.

In the MOST ANCIENT CHURCH the indebted and the possessive were one in the perception, and we might speak of an indebted possessive, just as they had a voluntary intellectual from the Human Divine of the Lord.

In the ANCIENT CHURCH these two were separated, but nevertheless in the conscience they were together.

In the HEBREW and the JEWISH CHURCHES the indebted perished entirely; the sun therein was darkened, and the possessive no longer as a moon received its lumen therefrom, whereby it became a hot-bed of spontaneous generations from hell, because the love of self and of the world in that possessive had gradually become completely infernal. Therefore their possessive - "the rich man's" possessive - by miracles was compelled to give a representation of a Church; a Church itself they could no longer form, for it is the indebted that makes the body of a Church.

Then the Land came into the world in order to give out of His Divine Human a new indebted to the proprium of the human race. The PRIMITIVE CHRISTIAN CHURCH had a new indebted and with that an entirely new disposition of mind, at first without any possessive, which is to be understood by this that they could not then bear the many things the Lord had yet to say.

In the NEW CHURCH there now arises in the immost of that new indebted - the good gift of the Coming - a new possessive, the true gift of the Second Coming. To her is given the enjoyment of a possessive indebted, that is, the enjoyment of Doctrine of the Genuine Truth. From the Lord's side this signifies: given the enjoyment, that is, for the good use of life. But from the side of the man of the New Church it signifies something else, namely: We owe to the Lord a possessive; we owe to the Lord Doctrine - the internal sense of the parable of a certain Nobleman who gave to his ten servants ten pounds, Luke XIX: 12-27. In this the New Church also has an entirely different attitude from the Primitive Christian Church, an entirely different simplicity and humility, which we must not confuse. Whoso wishes to withdraw himself from the truth that we owe to the Lord a possessive, that we owe to the Lord Doctrine, by saying that he prefers a childlike simple faith, and

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wishes to keep to that, assumes a semblance of a piety, a simplicity, an innocence, which misplacedly imitates those virtues of the first Christians, without resembling them even as to the outermost shadow. For of what untouched virginally pure, self-contained and whole stature those virtues of the solely indebted of the first Christians were, is proved by practically all wooden and stone images of the early Middle Ages, these being anonymous holy arisings out of the Natural of the Lord's Divine Human. The Lord's Coming brought to the human race a new indebted - on which account so much is said in the Gospels about debt [schuld], innocence [onschuld], and indebtedness; the Lord's Second Coming plants in the midst of that a new possessive as a Tree of Life - on which account the Latin Word speaks of the delight of possession. The PRIMITIVE CHRISTIAN CHURCH kept its indebted untouched, but later on this indebted was corrupted, when they began to acquire a possessive not from the Lord, but from themselves, justly called a "degenerated manly faculty", DE HEMELSCHE LEER, Third Fascicle, p, 104. The NEW CHURCH could not come into its possessive by soiling its indebted; the indebted is no other than what is willing to follow, the voluntary of following Him in each and all things of life. The history of the Churches is the history of the breach between the indebted and the possessive, of which in Isaiah; "The light of the moon shall be as the light of the sun, and the light of the sun shall be sevenfold, as the light of seven days, in the day that the Lord bindeth up the breach of His people", XXX: 26. First in the NEW CHURCH that breach is fully bound up, and the Doctrine of the Church is its hereditary possession, and those who confess it are heirs and sons of God. On this account the NEW CHURCH is the crown of Churches. But let us listen to still something else in this superlative, namely that this Crowning Church is not only the princely Church itself, but at the same time for the King of kings is a Church of princes. Every Doctrine of Genuine Truth is a prince, a prince of an aristocracy such as the Most Ancient Church in its highest glory has not known. See ARCANA COELESTIA 9221-9222: "Thou shalt not curse God, signifies that truths Divine must not he blasphemed .... And the prince in thy people thou shalt not execrate signifies that neither is the doctrine of truth

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to be blasphemed". Now this anew, but now with the fullest weight, lays down for us the significance and the responsibility of what society should be for us and we for society. For society is a [royal] following of which we then are the courtiers, the noblemen. The New Church and in that Church the Doctrine of the Church brings a new disposition of mind along with it, and with that disposition a new attitude, behaviour, yea, an entirely new education. If all we had to care about were an indebted, as with the first Christian., only to keep it pure; if all we had to care about were a possessive, as with the Jews, only to enlarge it, the case would be simpler, and so with the majority it is, and is therefore wrong, for then there is a question of more or less, while it is just said "not the least more or less". The NEW CHURCH, the Crown of Churches: well, let us in this superlative listen to still something else: the Most Ancient Church in its golden age "was not in the truth", T.C.R. 786; this involves that therefore in the proper sense it was not in good. In the New Church for the first time since Creation the genuine truths and goods sprout forth; and everything in history that has been of great testimonies out of living life from the Lord, here and now in the Divine genuineness of this Crowning Church finds its fulfillment, perfection, essential being, regeneration. And if it finds such in the New Church, it must also find it again in the larger and smaller society of that Church. If we understand the superlative above mentioned in that sense, a celestial superlative, it then becomes oppressively clear that a society is a [royal] following of noblemen, the court of courts for that Church of churches. Not a party, not a club, not a private circle, a convention, a conference, but a society" that is a [royal] following of followers. In His Coming the Lord said to His followers: "Ye are the salt of the earth"; in His Second Coming the Lord repeats this word, and even more: He wills to ennoble them all, to the nobility of His image and His likeness. We purposely used italics on page 59 for the word Nobleman, when quoting from the parable concerning the ten pounds in Luke XIX; the Latin text has Homo quidam nobilis, that is literally a Nobleman. The word nobilis, of ancient times gnobilis, is derived from to know, to be acquainted with, to have been known from antiquity. In that sense let the nobility of the New Church be understood, a nobility of conscience. For as

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regards the world's nobility, the same may be said as of former churches: "By not keeping its purity, it did not come to where it should and could have come". And just as a fallen Church was newly re-erected among another just nation, among heathens, so the fallen nobility arises anew among other just families, among citizens, for nobility from its origin, its first root, is celestial. Nobility is nothing but a natural ennobled from the Lord, not only a standing, a state, a degree higher, but also every standing, state, and degree purer and cleaner. Taken in that sense to regenerate is to ennoble, to raise to nobility. Therefore if we here speak of nobility in connection with the Church, with society, and with the man of the Church, we thereby understand the truths of life having become life; in them is the nobility seated, and in no sense in the truths of faith unless conjoined therewith: only that application ennobles, and where that nobility is missing man lacks the ultimates by which the Lord from firsts can operate the truths of faith. The nobility of the NEW CHURCH is the nobility of the ennobled natural (adel [nobility] is derived from kind, nature, hereditary ground, yea even from good), and in the man of the Church the nobility is nothing but his virtue, his virtue as the salt of the earth. The sublime moralist La Bruyere said strikingly: "If nobility is virtue, it perishes by everything unvir­tuous, and if it is not virtue, it is of small account", Les Caracteres, ch. 14. In the old dead churches they do not quite know what to do about the attitude and behaviour of man to God and to his fellow-man, and consequently they sway between a theoretical self-abasement and a condescending amiability, both evil and false to their very core, laying bare the unbound and the unbindable breach between a violated indebted and a falsified possessive. With the New Church a new nobility arises, where man not only knows his rank and place but also his attitude as a nobleman; yea, only from the known attitude can he know his place in the temple, and the nobility of that known attitude he receives from the Lord in each truth of life applied to life. In our attitude the relation between truths of life and truths of faith appears noble, royal, stately, if there is a ratio between life and faith, not the least more or less, ignoble, slavish, lopsided, if there is on either side a too much or a too little. May we be allowed to continue this theme frankly and open-

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heartedly. As in the blessed year of our Lord 1928 "Het Handbook voor de Algemeene Kerk van het Nieuwe Jeruzalem" appeared, just so we often imagine it will be a great blessing when some day "The Handbook for the Society of the New Church" will appear. For a society is a following, and a following is to follow, and to follow is to live, and to live requires truths of life that have to come to belong to life; society now lacks truths of life, at any rate it has not enough thereof or has not applied enough thereof to life, to have all truths of faith become essentially of faith. Let us, in order to understand this well, first make it quite clear to ourselves that true society on earth is a correspondence to society in Heaven, and is as such a representative of Doctrine, for "all things of every doctrine view each other as in a certain society, and the things which recognize a common principle as father, are conjoined as if by relationship of blood and affinity", A.C. 4720. From this it appears that a society is not only a spiritual following in the proper sense, but even a spiritual family as well: "In the society in which each person is, the blood-relationship commences; and from this proceed the affinities even to the circumferences", A.C. 3815. That Hebrew superlative "science of sciences" involves for instance that of ancient times the sciences formed a society, a family, with the Science of Correspondences as the ancestor from whom they had the nobility of being "noble sciences" (note that the word "noble" in this sense is used, or rather abused, even to the present times). A human society as a following of followers must therefore spiritual-naturally be ennobled to a celestial relationship of blood and affinity, to an angelic family. "Every society or every family of spirits", says A.C. 1758, and in n. 1159: "That families in the internal sense signify probity, and also charity and love, comes herefrom that all things which are of mutual love, in the Heavens are as relationships of blood and affinities, thus as families". Are our societies families in that sense? In the sense namely of probity, Latin probitas, a wonderful word, involving: good, strong, willing to serve, eminent, sincere, honest, honourable, virtuous, well-educated, well-behaved, valuable, worthy, wholesome (in Dutch we have the expression ,,een probaat middel", that is, a proved remedy). In the words "family signifies probity" the words from the

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CANONS clearly re-appear: "In the degree in which the truths of life become of life ... "; and therefore we may say that the probity of tendencies and affections forms the body of the society, and that without that nobility of probity a society has neither body nor soul.

In the HANDBOEK 'VOOR DE ALGEMEENE KERK the HANDBOOK FOR THE SOCIETY lies already enclosed as a germ, namely in the Conclusion: "The Upbuilding of the Church" where the main lines of religious education and religious family life are indicated; in the nature of things very summarily; but pure genuine truths of faith desiring nothing else than to drop down as a beneficent rain of truths of life, and to ascend in a vapour, which happens when "the external man begins to follow and to serve the internal", A.C. 91; for one might say that the truths of life are the rain and the vapour by which the external of man is watered and humidified by the internal. And if the advance of Doctrine is not accompanied with a proportional ennobling of life, with a proportional advance of probity, ever deeper into the celestial spring of that virtue of virtues, a spiritual evil arises which in correspondence with a bodily ailment may be called metabolic disease. And then the great word must be said: in the face of what society in us and around us must be and become, society is still dead, as dead as family and country which today likewise are dead. It would be meet for us with respect thereto, for a long, a very long while, to fast and that not with a sad, but with a cheerful countenance; it would be meet for us with respect thereto for a long, a very long while, to exercise a strict discipline in order that the disturbed equilibrium may be restored. What gives to the starry firmament its entrancing sacredness? The velvet darkness, the peaceful quiet, the deep solitude. Only in the good obscurity, quietness, and solitude can the beholding of all those sparkling worlds within nature be raised to a perception of the angelic societies in the Heavens. And now, if the voluntary in the natural be not ennobled to a peaceful state of good darkness, quiet, solitude, the intellectual beholding of all the sparkling truths of faith within science, cannot be raised to the perception of its internal sense. Just to see theoretical things in practical things: In the essay mentioned "The Upbuilding of the Church", as part of the worship in the

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home, mention is made of prayer at meals, often to be concluded by reading from the Word. We would however wish to draw attention to the conversations during meals in the home and in society; and after manifold experience and careful observation we cannot but frankly say: that society is still a dead external man, is proved by the uninspired conversation, in which nevertheless almost all place their heaven. Conversation is dead, merely one disorderly, restless flight of ideas; and therefore a sincere fasting and a noble discipline for family and society might consist in not speaking at meals for a long while, but that during meals (which should always be well cared for but at the same time as simple as possible) one of the members should read aloud. This would leave or bring every mind into its good darkness, quiet, and solitude; it would in that way have more opportunity to let certain truths of life come to life than when being whirled around in a whirlpool of empty chatter between prayer before the meal and reading after. A fasting in talk and a discipline in observing silence would operate beneficially. And so there are a thousand things more. For just as the dead external society cannot converse together, just so it cannot celebrate a festival; just as it can only chatter, it knows only of jollification *; the blessed joy of all in each is farther

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* Jollification, not joy. In confirmation of this, by way of a very great exception, let us quote a rare poet's word, from Stephane Mallarme "LA MUSIQUE ET LES LETTRES", p. 67: Si, dans l'avenir, en France, ressurgit une religion, ce sera l'amplification a milles joies de l'instinct de ciel en chacun. If this had come from the Word, these words, again translated, would liter­ally have to read thus: "As soon as, in the sure future, in the natural mind, a religion, the True Christian Religion, rises again, it will be the amplification to a thousand joys of the perception of heaven in each one". This prophetic word should in golden letters be inscribed in the Handbook for Society, as also another word from this poet in the true sense: Imaginez ... qu'un Livre parut, relatif a la Societe, epouvantable et delicieux, hors les sentences rendues par “ceci est beau - cela est mauvais", quelconque, inhumain, etranger, dont l'extase ou la colere que les choses simplement soient ce qu'elles sont, avec tant de stridence absolue montat, DIVAGATIONS p. 363. A Book on Society, externally a Judgment, internally one sweet delight, far above the possibility of being talked about by the world as being beautiful or ugly, and itself also elevated above such sentences, being impersonal, super-personal, not-human, that is, averse to all filthy 

[NOTE: The footnote above is continued at the bottom of the next page.]

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away than far. Therefore a sincere fasting and a noble discipline would have to bring an essential change of the spirit of all our festival days. So birthdays would have to lose the shrill, clattering, exuberant character of a proprium ­jubilee. In the celebration gratitude should rule for man having been born to Heaven, which commemoration would then ennoble the joy and the gifts with a soul and with sense. As previously said in order to essentially be nearer one another we must stand farther apart. The law of spheres applies also, indeed specifically, to social intercourse. A man's sphere is made by his truths of life having become life, and for as much as they have become life they shine forth around his head in the truths of faith. Harmony between various such spheres is for the first time truly society: "A society is nothing but a harmony of several", A.C. 687. And harmony means proportionality, sequence, marriage, correspondence, relationship of blood and affinity. It is by the spheres that light and heat are tempered, moderated; a true society lies in the temperate zone, out of sunstroke heat and polar cold.

To the Handbook for Society it would then also belong to unfold according to the internal sense a Memorable Relation such as that concerning the Joys of Heaven and eternal Blessedness, with which THE TRUE CHRISTIAN RELIGION ends and the Book on CONJUGIAL LOVE begins -"let him that readeth understand" - and in so doing to unfold it to truths of life, telling that in the Christian world no one knows anything concerning celestial joys, taking them to be an admission, most joyful gatherings, meals with the patriarchs, paradisiacal pleasures, supreme dominion, and endless services of worship; six characteristic faults of thinking and of life, faults through taking

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[Note: The following footnote is a continuation from the bottom of the previous page.]

warmth or all narrow-minded social feelings of men. Stranger, that is Doctrine out of celestial origin; and therefore in the ecstasy of theorein, of regarding -and in that to attend a festival, and with the prassein in the gall, for in society the truths of faith are in the gall of falsities of life. And that extase or colere - we thereby think of that paper which in descending through the Heavens had a golden and a silver glow, but in the lands was charred black; and this is the golden ecstasy or the splenetic anger because of "the things simply having to be what they are" - ascends with an absolute purity of sound, the style of the Doctrine according to the Divine style of the Word.

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direct cognizance out of the unpurified voluntary of the natural mind. Doctrine teaches that the spiritual sense of the Word is not obtained by direct cognizance of the letter. Life also is a letter the internal sense of which is not obtained by direct cognizance. Everything that comes directly is from the natural mind which says: "I, Sir", and it does not go, Matthew XXI: 28-32.

It is the love of self and of the world in the natural voluntary which over and over again withdraws from the eye the essential natural, that is, the Natural of the Divine Human. We being once purified from that love of self and of the world - by allowing the truths of life to become life, to become probity - the Lord's Natural would open to the voluntary of each one his paradise also of genuine earthly delights; every use would become unspeakable joy, every joy inexhaustible use. By fasting and discipline the natural voluntary would have to be led to prefer the noble genuine delight above the ignoble semblance of delight. How sadly far society still stands away from that blessedness; and therefore it is not astonishing that it does not yet know what it is to celebrate a festival, theorein in prassein. For it does not yet know what is repentance and penitence; as society it has not yet heard and followed John's voice, not in that word which he spoke to the soldiers: "Be content with your wages". Most men do not content themselves with their wages of truths of life, but desire a large war-booty of truths of faith. Thence the disproportions that make themselves nowhere so evident as in society, and there on all sides cause such silly, queer, foolish, strange things to occur at times. Is this true or not? A Roman proverb said: "The senators each individually good men, but as senate together a mob". So each society has a proprium, its macroproprium, and it is from the individual and from the family that it is necessary to guard and to fight against that, in order that it shall not at any time extinguish all truths of life with an evil voluntary and hold councils over the truths of faith with a false intellectual.

It is the truths of faith in which we are alone with the Lord, it is the truths of life in which especially we should be able to be together, and especially be able to discretely and chastely treat each other, in good mutual understanding,

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without inquisitive meddling. A society very often conducts itself in too overpopulated a manner: there is no space and no place left free, each one lies across the other, and there arises a kind of society-communism: everything for all together and nothing for each; which finally results in the vulgar taking the leading part - as in the world. The Doctrine has come to make first a distinction and afterwards a separation between waters and waters. "The more distinctly each Angel of a society is his, thus free, and so as out of himself and out of his affection he loves the companions, the more perfect is the form of society", D.P. 4. It is according to the truths of life having become life that man or Angel is distinctly his own, and it is out of that life alone that he as from himself can love the companions. To love society is to be in the perception and affection of moral and civil truth, and this perception and affection are the body of which the perception of spiritual truth out of the affection thereof is the soul. (D.P. 36.) In the favourable sense therefore "to be in the body while being in society" is nothing else than to be in the pure natural mind, purely one's self, purely one's affection, in one's peace and joy, in one's good darkness in which alone the light of Heaven shines, in one's good silence in which alone the Lord's voice sounds, in the good solitude in which all things of the will come to a stand, to an understanding. What marvel that if all in the society are so clean-footed, that then the form of the society is the more perfect? And if only the members of all societies would but understand that, in order to come to the blessedness of this, nothing but the accent, but the situation, need be altered. With the same people, the same things, a hell is there, but also a Heaven is possible; a hell of imbecile jolliness or a Heaven of happy sociability. For sociability is a quality of society and as such, like the proprium, from celestial origin, and like the proprium, it has become as stinking. Society, just as the individual, must allow itself to be regenerated from the Lord, and this sets in as soon as it becomes conscious of the nobility of that which from the Lord is inherent in it; and it does not become conscious of that nobility unless it learns, as from itself, to feel nobly and to behave nobly. The Word teaches not to judge the neighbour's internal, but the moral and civil of him, not his faith but his life, thus the social of

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him. Therein lies a practical truth of life for society ready to be applied: Talk a little less about others and the things of others, not only in a disdainful and disapproving sense, but also in the sense of over-estimation and over-praise. That in which every society that has turned away from the Lord especially loses itself, is an endless mutual flattery, a restless chase after the glory of wisdom, scholarliness, angelicness, and so forth. Every thing that is said in the Word about flattery, adulation, about hypocrisy and lying, about the love of self and of the world, in this social disease of wishing to please, breaks forth as evil boils. The fall of all churches repeats itself therein. The remedy against this is hygiene and economy, self­ discipline with each one and a spiritual, a chaste discretion in the extending and accepting of praise. Not until society conducts itself as the individual, and the individual as the society, both in the Lord, will the True Christian Society be in the Church and the Church therein. For the New Church indeed stands for ever, but not so society, except in so far as its truths of life have become of life.

It is through the truth of life applied to life in each one that a society, starting with the family, commences to live, becomes supple, pliable, willing to follow, and, like the sun traveling through all signs of the Zodiac, can set forth on its journey along all angelic societies. Man's changes of state are nothing but changes of society. (A.C. 4067.) And what applies to the living man, applies to the greater man or the living society. And in A.C. 4073 we read: "When the societies are adjoined to him from the Lord, he then is in good". This too applies to the greater man or the living society, to the [royal] following as we now understand it. Other angelic societies are adjoined from the Lord to the angel of our society if it be in good; and it is in good if it and each one in it makes the truths of life to be life.

The Handboek voor de Algemeene Kerk has been drawn up: the Handbook for the Society would grow and flourish, together with the life, just as the living ornameuts in the spiritual world. In itself it would have to be anonymous, just because each one of us from his personal life would therein give some communication. From a Handbook for

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it would become Acts of the Society, and as Practica it would run parallel with the Theoretica of DE HEMELSCHE LEER, included therein as additions under the titles: Woman, Children, Art, Education, The Garden, The Home, Dress, The Kitchen; but all of this a thousand miles and a thousand years away from the world. For the world of today no longer knows anything essential concerning any practicum, and what the society of the New Church must do is just to put away from its midst the things of this age. In the work on GENERATION, and for no idle reason just in that work, we read: "Out of these things it appears why women are passive, not only in physical acts but also in moral, whereas men out of nature are active; from which reason they also are more beautiful, more tender, and by their passive disposition itself as it were graces; furthermore that in every decision they are more prone and more determinable than men, and in every surface they appear more intelligent. For the ingenium of the age consists in this that we excel in imaginative strength, and our rational mind is only passive and reactive in respect to the things which inflow from the external senses; but that it be active and resist the affections of the animus, or that it be gifted with dominating strength, this today is not estimated as ingenious and scarcely as judgment; which is the reason that men cannot fail to be subject to women, while the consent of the 'majority or of the age favours it", n. 290.

The new society, that is, each society which allows itself, each member individually, to be reformed from the Lord, interiorly ceases to follow woman and in her the age; interiorly it makes itself loose from the world's society and from the society's world, for this is the age; interiorly it no longer "moves along with the times". For this reason also those good, mild, upright practica would then be far removed from that abominable spirit which rules this age, and does not even come to a stop in the external society of the Church, but mixes its venom among its truths of life. Verily, within the province of the Church, that is, everywhere where the Church rules, life must be learned anew starting from the very ground, that is, from decency, yea, from cleanliness. Why else should it say in the RATIONAL PSYCHOLOGY, that "it is an appearance that the becoming and the unbecoming is honesty".

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n. 31. How that word scourges these times, and how many practical truths must not every society and every family live through, take up into the blood, in order to arrive in life at a beginning of honesty, that is, a trifle farther than a certain gross decency which is not even so very far removed from rude indecency. In "The Up- building of the Church" it is spoken of the home, the family, the parents, the children, the servants. In the parable of the unclean spirit, Luke XI : 24-26, it is also spoken of a house, and in the unfolding thereof A. C. 5023 teaches: "The house there for the natural mind, which is called a house empty and swept when there are there not goods and truths which are the husband and the wife, not affections of good and truth which are the sons and daughters, nor such things which confirm which are the maidservants and menservants". Note well: the natural mind which waives all goods and truths, and thus becomes filled with evils and falses. We further read: "By these things is described the profanation of the truth from the Lord; by the unclean spirit when he goes out is understood the acknowledgment and faith of truth; and by the house swept a life against the truths; by his return with seven other ones the state of profanation", A.C. 8882. Here we most clearly see the tremendous conflict between theory and practice, for the spirit goes forth to truths of faith, while the empty house, that is, the body crammed with evils and falses rejects the daily bread of the truths of life. What is the use in such a house, family, and society of "joint prayer" and "holy reading"? See, it is in this sense that the Handbook for the Church will ask for a Handbook for the Society, and, as said, for something quite different still, something which the members of the Church have before their eyes monthly, weekly, daily, a tender and severe guide to truths of life, and to the infinite, inexpressibly blessed goods of life, in order that the natural mind may arrive at a life which does not clash with the genuine truths of faith, profaning them in the end. To put the matter crudely: the mere taking up of truths of faith is an endless course of dry swimming, meanwhile wallowing in worldly phantasies. A simple plebeian who, when taking up the truth of faith, omits no single daily truth of life, is a nobleman of the New Most Ancient Imperishable Nobility; and the finely cultured,

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learned man who with overgreat interest discards the newest truths of faith for the very newest, driven on by the desire in no case to be less than the others or to be in the wrong, is a vulgar body; for what else is a profaner? The Coming is lost in the Second Coming if platter and cup are not cleansed, and it is the natural mind that must be prepared to be a vessel of life. Our home and our family must form a representation around us of the things of the natural mind, and piece by piece they must correspond, the parents to the goods and truths, the children to the affections, the servants to the confirmatory things. That is to say: our natural mind must become too grand, too noble, to be occupied with itself and the world; it must, to quote an illustration from the Word, prefer the celestial aura above a prickly clod of earth. Where that is not the case, the spiritual influx has disappeared from marriage, family connections, and relation of service; certainly, exteriorly there is mutually much that is dear, hearty, intimate, oh, a forest full of monkey-love, but interiorly those houses, homes, families, societies are dead and empty, evil and false, swallowed up by the world and its cares. So in the Church and its society it should be possible for the pithy modern girl to again become a modest, sedate, chaste maiden, and for the clown of sports to become again a youth, both of them representative figures; but what would then become of their parties and matches, their endless circle of amusements, their dances, their negro-music, their novels, their films, in short, their whirlpool of seemly pleasures, in which their natural mind can never arrive at honesty? Again an example how very necessary, indeed how vitally necessary, are those truths of life which will give to Society another youth; not truths which early accustom the child to dry swimming, but which would ennoble and steel the mind with joys and inspirations, compared with which today's amusements are merely civilized wantonness, leaving a very dirty drab behind. What will the truths of faith high up avail if the spirit of the times down below draws everything away in its whirlpool? The abomination of desolation is this assault from down below, this stopping up tight of life against every truth of life. For note how in almost every society and family it is possible to chatter for a long while whether a book, a

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film, a dance, a dress, a fellow-being is of this kind or that - out of life there is no longer any yea-yea, nay-nay; even all instinctive dislike, this last sign of rectitude and conscience in the natural, has disappeared from our social life. Once more, therefore, for us and ours we must pray to the Lord for a new Epoch - from epechein, to hold fast, to withhold, to hold still; and this is possible only if we make life and doctrine proportionate. And this is not possible without fasting and discipline, the two of which correspond to "the devastations and punishments in the other life according to the nature of the false and the life contracted thence, before the spirit of man can be received in a society; some have to suffer severely; but during the devastations they are kept in the hope of deliverance and in the thought of the end in view", A.C. 1106-1113. That which for most of us is a stumbling block is the good things of the past, the things of religiosity of the former times which in the religion wish to assure themselves the same place. Art, for example. Not only does art occupy a very different place in religion from what it does in religiosity, but it also is of a totally different essence. In the religiosity it may occupy the place of man and woman and of daughter and son in the house of the natural mind; in the religion it belongs to the confirmantia, the confirming things, the servants, that is, for commemoration, consideration, and taking to heart of the celestial things, as the Images in the houses and temples of the Ancients. And what in the state of religiosity may be a noble enjoyment of art, might in the state of religion become a voracity, a gluttony, if the natural mind neglects certain truths of life; while art would then, like the sirens, make its voice heard from a place where it is not, and would end with being “a voice singing in the windows", Zeph. II: 14, that is, argumentation out of phantasies. To the PRACTICA, to the ACTS of the Society, it would belong to liberate one's self from all art standing outside of the truths of life and outside of the truths of faith, and, properly, one would not need to learn to liberate one's self, but only to unlearn to hold fast tenaciously, for liberating the Lord alone does. What stands in the way of most men is the culture of their former religiosity, and nothing of religiosity can pass directly and immediately into religion;

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it must first have died before it can rise again. This is in the inmost highest sense a truth of faith, but if it cannot be at the same time in the outermost lowest sense a truth of life, we withhold from it a place to lay the head, and in the human mind there is unrest and chaos. In MEMORABILIA 3702 there is this awful warning: "It is fatal for good societies to have the same subject as evil ones". A warning such as this, just as that one from THE TRUE CHRISTIAN RELIGION: "That the friendship of love entered into with a man regardless of his quality as to the spirit, is very hurtful after death ... , where the good have to suffer hard things", n. 446--449, as a truth of life has to enter life above all other truths, for otherwise the words fatal and very hurtful would not have been chosen. Our societies and the families therein labour under thousands of fatal and very hurtful things from the world, and if we ask who enticed these subjects to come in, it is always over again the natural voluntary that was left un-ennobled. "An Adamite at the first sight of our sham civilization would at once have swooned with terror" (DE HEMELSCHE LEER, First Fasc. p. 83). But a thousand times more terror should take hold of the Adamite in us when we regard this abomination, that after the Lord's Coming on earth and with the Second Coming of the Lord in the Doctrine of the Church, the natural mind can continue imperturbably to whore after that sham civilization and to feel at home in the world. The world is there for the society for the sake of the useful and necessary contrast. It stands against society as a raging sea, ready to leap. One accent only need be interiorly changed, and where there lay the pool of the world, a flourishing paradise opens to the natural mind, to the reborn Adamite.

In former times and by former churches considerations such as these would have been looked upon as penitential sermons, as admonitions to self-sacrifice, to the renunciation of all sensual pleasures, but rather they are the contrary, a call to noblesse oblige and to Mannerstolz vor Konigsthron; but then these sayings also heard anew: as an indebted possessive, as a possessive by inheritance. Never has any court or nobility been equal to the court and the nobility which the Society of the New Church must be, can be, shall be; whatever there has been of court and nobility in

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history, is at best a weak representation thereof and for the greater part a sharp contrast. That nobility comes to us from the Lord through the truths of life, that nobility is our attitude, our stature, our body, which is fed by those truths as with daily bread, in order that our spirit in a healthy body may operate the truths of faith. This is to approach the Holy Supper worthily; this also is, as a wedding-guest not to sit down in the highest room, but in the lowest room, Luke XIV: 8-11. To exalt one's self is to pay attention only to truths of faith and thus to believe one's self at home in a certain light far above one's own love; to humble one's self is constantly to observe the truths of life and to acknowledge the Lord's Infinite Mercy in the enlightenment of one's understanding and in the warming of one's love. Herein “the least among you". To observe the truths of life and to make them of life, is to be faithful in small things, is to content one's self with one's wages; it is not only to make the paths straight, and to pave a road but also to maintain them, for the truths of faith. The sphere of Divine Worship is not except out of the fulfilled truths of life, which not until then are the true whole firstlings of the fruit of the field, an Abel-offering to the Lord. What therefore the Society of the Church needs for its truths of faith, is truths of life which make its sphere blessed, so blessed that of its members it may be said what is said of the Angels: "When the Angels are in their Society, they are in their face", A.C. 4797. Then Society is in truth a Following of followers whose Court is called NUNC LICET: "Now it is permitted to enter intellectually into the Mysteries of Faith", intellectually out of the regenerated voluntary, thus possessively from inheritance.

In conclusion let us in this connection point to the parable of the poor widow at the treasury, Luke XXI: 1-4'. A widow is a man who being in good desires the respective truth, or, being in truth desires the respective good; exteriorly an indigent state, interiorly a state of preparation for the kingdom of heaven; for that desire is an affection of conjugial love, is an acknowledgment out of humiliation that no good is genuine without its truth, no truth genuine without its good, thus no doctrine genuine

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without life, no life genuine without Doctrine. Such are indeed comparatively a poor widow, but in their genuine desire the good or the truth in which they are already begins to conjoin itself with that truth or good which they as yet are lacking, it begins already with toil and care to win something of that, and that gain is two mites, (Latin duo minuta), two small, trifling, slight things; two has reference to the marriage of good and truth, mites has reference to a truth of life having become life and thence a truth of faith having become faith; for a truth of life, however small, that has become of life, makes every truth of faith faith, and thus glorifies the Lord in Doctrine with life. Hence the word: "This poor widow has cast in more than they all"; more than they all means: only this gift is genuine. For the temple is the Church, the treasury has reference to the treasure gathered in the Heavens; Jesus looking on, is the Doctrine judging life following the Doctrine; the rich are they who have an opulence of truths not living, not having become life, and thus therefrom cannot contribute to the offerings of God - being Doctrine and life - two mites as the poor widow "out of her penury all the living that she had"; the penury signifies the humiliation and the acknowledgment of the state of widowhood, and the toil and care for some genuine gain; all the living has reference to the bread daily prayed for, every word going forth out of the mouth of God, that is, out of the life of the Lord, which bread the widow consumes crumb by crumb as her only living (Latin victus, from vita, life), and which bread the rich only slightly esteem. The poor widow here has not only a favourable but even an excellent sense, namely that of the man who lives according to the "not the least more or less". The gift of the poor widow is a treasure in Heaven, the gift of the rich is a treasure which the moth, rust, and thieves consume, for every abundant remnant of life and wisdom perishes, and is no genuine good nor genuine truth. The desire of most men for spiritual wealth is love of self and love of the world, by which merely science is made great. The individual must stand before the congregation, the society of the Church, as did the poor widow at the treasury, casting in a gift of God of two mites "out of her penury all the living that she had".

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DE HEMELSCHE LEER

TRAGEDY AND REGENERATION

AN ASPECT OF THE DRAMATIC ART IN BOTH WORLDS

AN ADDRESS BY NORMAN WILLIAMS BEFORE
THE NEW CHURCH CLUB, LONDON, JUNE 14TH, 1935.

"To be created also signifies to be regenerated". This familiar phrase from T.C.R. 573 comes as a revelation to few of us, yet that is exactly what it is. And though we may have found some comfortable way of applying it, it does not cease to be a revelation, and pregnant - more vitally pregnant than before - with new and deeper potentia­lities. There are many other phrases equally familiar: for example, "Behold, I make all things new". To make new is to re-create, and to re-create is to regenerate. So we have the term "recreation", which, as distinct from diversion, means again regeneration. It will be the endeavour of the essayist, in the time at his disposal, to demonstrate his belief that this association of regeneration with recreation is not merely burdening a popular word with a meaning which is far too heavy for it.

That there is a distinction between diversion and recreation is most obvious. Diversions, by calling into play the less complicated and more fully developed faculties, cause a relaxation of the higher powers, which has its beneficial effect in the freshness and renewed vigour of their subsequent operations. Recreations, on the other hand, are delights intimately associated with the higher faculties, mental or physical, and we usually find that a man's intellectual recreations are on an altogether higher plane than the operations of his use. So we find in C.L. 17 that in the Heavens there are "days of festivity ... for the relaxation of the animi". And at other times manifestations of the affections of spiritual love as in the sweet singing of maidens which is heard every morning in the public places, and "that the sound of the singing as it were inspires or animates itself out of the interior .... Moreover, outside the city there are dramatic entertainments in theatres, by actors who represent the various honourable qualities and virtues of moral life, among whom there are lesser actors for the sake of the relation .. No

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virtue with its honourable qualities and beauties can be exhibited to the life except by means of relatives, from the greatest of them to the least; the lesser actors represent the least of them, even till they become none; but it has been decreed by law, that nothing of the opposite which is called dishonorable and unbecoming, should be exhibited, except figuratively and as it were from afar. The reason for this decree is that nothing that is honorable and good in any virtue can by successive progressions pass over to what is dishonorable and evil, but only to its leasts, when it perishes; and when it perishes the opposite commences; wherefore Heaven, where all things are honorable and good, has nothing in common with hell, where all things are dishonorable and evil".

The conception of a play without evil characters, and with a definite moral end, may seem at first a tame and insipid one, as of a mere representative pageant without development, unity, or conflict - a parading of virtues for admiration. Although this may be an exaggeration of the average man's reaction to the description of the drama given above, there can be little doubt that most of us have at some time or other had a fleeting sensation that a drama of that type, though more pure than the drama as we know it, and the only possible drama for the theatres of the angelic Heavens, must lose something of the full-blooded robustness of the earthly drama, and lose considerably the intensity of its appeal.

There is, however, no standard or criterion in modern drama: at its best it seems to strive for the expression of a point of view or the delineation of romantically strange or sentimentally familiar characters. Conflict is almost invariably in the direct opposition of good and evil, and we obtain a certain pleasure from seeing the good triumphant. But because a conflict of good and evil develops only partizanship, this pleasure is short-lived. It does not enter deeply into our hearts, and entails no inward struggle on our part as audience. In the early days of the art, however, when Aeschylus had lifted it from a mere feature of religious ritual, and Sophocles and Euripides had written their strong, soul-stirring dramas, a theory was evolved by Aristotle, and embodied in his short work, the POETICS. The writer believes that in this work, and in such of the

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plays of the three tragedians as he has read, there is a survival of the heavenly drama form, and a definite pointer to the New Church for its future cultural development.

For in the Greek drama, although at times the issue was obscured, the greatest tragedy is that of the conflict of good with less good. Here the affections of the audience were enlisted on both sides - they were torn in the struggle, finding themselves first in one camp, then in another, though the field might be no larger than the soul of one human being. They were shown, by means of characters representing virtues, the agony of a man in spiritual growth, the power of affection for old ideals to close the mind to new ones, and the ultimate triumph of the new man, and the death of the old. This death of that which they had loved was the melancholy aspect of their tragedy: but its glorious strength lay in the triumph of the new ideals. How bitter these struggles can be we all know from experience.

One of the modern tests of a good play or a good novel is whether the characters continue to live in our minds when the action of the tale is ended. Creation of character, in other words, is the first essential. Yet Aristotle in his POETICS says:

"Of all the parts of tragedy, the most important is the combination of incidents, or the fable". This seems as if we have made a certain development since that time, for surely no virtues can be presented apart from human characters. But there is an interesting statement in DE VERBO 15: "In Greece they from correspondences made fables, and from the Divine attributes they made many Gods, and called the greatest of them Jove, from Jehovah". A large proportion of the Greek plays were actual dramatizations of these mythological fables, and consequently had direct bearing on the spiritual life of man. To Aristotle this fable is something prior to the drama. It exists first as an inspiration in the mind of the poet, then it is ultimated in the dramatic form, and finally it lives again in the minds of the audience. And quite impartially, writing of the Agamemnon of Aeschylus, Professor Gilbert Murray says:

"The characters of this play seem, in a sense, to rise out of the theme, and consequently to have, amid all their

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dramatic solidity, a further significance which is almost symbolic. Cassandra is, as it were, the incarnation of that knowledge which Herodotus describes as the crown of sorrow, the knowledge which sees and warns and cannot help. Agamemnon himself, the King of Kings, triumphant and doomed, is a symbol of pride and the fall of pride. We must not think of him as bad, or specially cruel. The watchman loved him, and the lamentations of the Elders over his death have a note of personal affection. But I suspect that Aeschylus, a believer in the mystic meaning of names, took the name Agamemnon to be a warning that aya mnvei (agamimnei) 'the unseen wrath abides' " - and so on.

Let us consider for a moment what Aristotle wrote about the drama of his day. First he divides plays into the two categories of comedy and tragedy. He says it is the func­tion of tragedy to present men as better, and of comedy to present them as worse than they are. The comedy of which he speaks is that satirical type developed to such high perfection by Aristophanes, and though it could be turned to good uses, Aristotle's descriptions of its nature is very fair, and it can with a moderate degree of safety be dismissed as unsuited to the purposes of drama in the Heavens.

Tragedy, on the other hand, sounds rather more likely, and he further defines it as follows: "Tragedy is an imitation of some action that is important and entire, and of proper magnitude - by language embellished and rendered pleasurable, but by different means in different parts - in the way not of narration, but of action - effecting through pity and terror the correction and refinement of such passions".

This is a little obscure, owing to the fact that Aristotle's definition is also meant to serve as a distinction between the dramatic and the epic. Professor Lascelles Abercrom­bie has paraphrased it as follows:

"Tragedy is the imitation of an action that is serious, complete in itself, and possessing a certain magnitude; in language that gives delight appropriate to each portion of the work, in the form of a drama, not of narrative, through pity and fear accomplishing its catharsis of such emotions".

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Katharsis, which Twining in the first translation renders as correction and refinement, is also variously translated as purgation or purification. Greek tragedy has, therefore, a moral end, which is the refinement of passions common to the audience as a whole. That is the function of tragedy.

The nature of tragedy, however, is not so easy to define. In the first place, Aristotle says it is an imitation of an action. An "action" we have seen to mean a fable, but an imitation is not, as the 18th and 19th centuries believed, a literal and external facsimile.

It is of supreme importance in this connection to remember that the end of tragedy is the catharsis of passions, and that everything must, therefore, look to that end. Consequently the imitation must be an imitation of essentials, and it follows that imitation will differ with the artistic medium employed. All art, according to Aristotle, is an imitation; but it is not photographic.

For example, everyone has at some time felt a deep and overwhelming delight in the beauty of a pure spring morning. We may explain that delight as springing from the correspondence of that scene to a heavenly one, and imagine that to transmit its colours to canvas and to score its sounds for musical instruments would be the functions of painting and music. But art is more than the dead letter. The colours of that scene, or the sounds of it, in isolation, could not carry with them the fullness of its delights. The work of the artist is to feel the true essence of the delight, to enlarge it, or permit it to be enlarged, by inspiration, and to represent it by means of all the massed powers of his own peculiar technique. That is the true imitation. The painter, therefore, would not depict so many trees and flowers and hedgerows all formed in different ways for different purposes - he might as well be trying to sketch the story of creation - but he would show so many faces of nature reacting in a fresh and living design of colour to the pure clean light; and the musician would express, perhaps, a gay, surging vitality within a strong and growing framework of enduring life. So the imitation of the stage, although it has both speech and action, must, by its limits of time and space, the restriction of its appeal to two of the senses, and its necessity of expressing that

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which is seldom or never put into either speech or action, have its own convention and forms of imitation.

But to return to Aristotle: "Tragedy is an imitation of an action that is important, entire, and of proper magnitude". It is, of course, obvious that a play must be entire and of proper magnitude. A break in continuity would render the whole play meaningless, as also, unless it is done intentionally, and the earlier incident is used in the gradual unfolding of the plot, is an opening when some of the action has already passed. An unfinished play is manifestly ridiculous, and is often, by the absence of climax and conclusion, definitely unmoral. The magnitude of drama is also obviously restricted: here again Aristotle was regarding it as distinct from epic poetry, which, by having frequently within it plot and incident sufficient for a whole series of dramas, lacks unity, development, and strength when spread out on the stage.

He says: "In general we may say that an action is sufficiently extended when it is long enough to admit of a change of fortune, from happy to unhappy, or the reverse, brought about by a succession, necessary or probable, of well connected incidents. A fable is not one, as some conceive it to be, merely because the hero of it is one".

To decide upon the importance of the action we must again look to the end of tragedy, which is the catharsis of passions. On this Aristotle says: "The change from prosperity to adversity should not be represented as happening to a virtuous character; for this raises disgust rather than terror or compassion. Neither should the contrary change from adversity to prosperity be exhibited in a vicious character: this, of all plans, is the most opposite to the genius of tragedy, having no one property that it ought to have: for it is neither gratifying in a moral view, nor affecting, nor terrible. Nor again should the fall of a very bad man from prosperous to adverse fortune be represented; because, though such a subject may be pleasing from its moral tendency, it will produce neither pity nor terror. For our pity is excited by misfortunes undeservedly suffered, and our terror by some resemblance between the sufferer and ourselves. Neither of these effects will, therefore, be produced by such an event".

"There remains, then, for our choice, the character be-

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tween these extremes: that of a person neither eminently virtuous or just, nor yet involved in misfortune by deliberate vice or villainy, but by some error of human frailty; and this person should also be someone of high fame and flourishing prosperity. For example, Oedipus, Thyestes, or other illustrious men of such families".

Note the sentence "for our pity is excited by misfortunes undeservedly suffered, and our terror by some resemblance between the sufferer and ourselves". This is curious, for Aristotle has already said that misfortune "should not be represented as happening to a virtuous character, for this raises disgust rather than terror or compassion"; nor is it punishment as such. It is the appearance of some flaw in the character of a man who is otherwise good, and whom we wish to overcome the weakness. It may even be that Aristotle had a vision of the heavenly dramas, in which the struggle would be that of the new conception of truth with the old, which has had life from the affections for so long, and which has tended to remain static rather than develop inwardly.

Let us turn again to C.L. 17: "No virtue with its honourable qualities and virtues" we read, "can be exhibited to the life except by means of relatives, from the greatest of them to the least; the lesser actors represent the least of them even till they become none; but it has been decreed by law that nothing of the opposite which is called dishonourable and unbecoming, should be exhibited except figuratively, and as it were from afar".

With regard to these relatives, they are apparently dealt with differently in the Greek drama, although there is no reason to suppose that the relatives in the other world might not be construed as the changing and progressive states of the individual.

Aristotle says: "But of all these parts the most important is the combination of incidents, or the fable. Because tragedy is an imitation, not of men, but of actions - of life, of happiness and unhappiness; for happiness consists in action, and the supreme good itself, the very end of life, is action of a certain kind - not quality. Now the manners of men constitute only their quality or characters, but it is by their actions they are happy, or the contrary. Tragedy, therefore, does not imitate action for the sake of

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imitating manners, but in the imitation of action that of manners is of course involved. So that the action and the fable are the end of tragedy, and in everything the end is of principal importance".

So much for the mechanism of tragedy. What of the tragedies themselves? We have seen that they were written by men with a certain end, and that an exalted one. Aristotle said of the old tragedians:

"In composing the poet should even, as much as possible, be an actor: for, by natural sympathy they are most persuasive and affecting who are under the influence of actual passion. We share the agitation of those who appear to be truly agitated - the anger of those who appear to be truly angry".

"Hence it is that poetry demands either great natural quickness of parts or an enthusiasm allied to madness. By the first of these we mould ourselves with facility to the imitation of every form: by the other, transported out of ourselves, we become what we imagine."

It is undesirable at this point to theorise on anything so controversial as poetic inspiration, but most of us will admit that poets often say more than they know by allowing. a kind of influx to play with the germ of the idea in their mind. It is, for example, impossible to believe that any process of cold intellection could have produced the magnificent dramas of Shakespeare, particularly as we see them, without his conscious guidance, gradually taking on the form prescribed by Aristotle, around fables drawn from history or legend.

We are, however, told repeatedly in the Word that every man, while in this world, is successively associated with societies of spirits in the other. Such a consociation with one whose mind is alert to affectional reactions cannot fail to have fruit, and, in the ordered mind, good fruit.

What seems to be pertinent to our immediate subject, however, is the truth that when a society communicates with a man by influx it does so by the whole society speaking through one of its members. Every society, however, is in the human form, that is to say, having regard to its own particular genius and the strength of it, each society is complete as to the means to give itself utterance and complete and effective expression and operation.

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Although Angels are in the human form, societies of Angels are more perfectly so, and it is suggested that these communal utterances and influxes of whole spiritual societies have_, as it were, an individualistic impersonality which can find its external form through poetic inspiration in a burning and vital expression by rebirth of ideas which have had their first birth in natural or less exalted intellectual processes.

Whether we believe in poetic inspiration or not, however, it would be difficult to deny a high moral sense in poets whose aim it was to purify the passions by means of their art. We do not see this ideal expressed so directly in any subsequent age.

It is because there seems to be a strong similarity between the Greek ideal and the description of theatres in the other world, which is given in T.C.R. and C.L., that this attempt has been made to co-ordinate them. Recreation and diversion are essentials of life. It is conceivable that a New Churchman might be able to find pleasure in the diversions of the Old Church, but recreation is too much akin with regeneration to allow of any such dangerous associations. As New Church culture expands, these re­creations will be regiven their place in our life: let us then be prepared for that day.

The drama is strongly recreative. In the New Church the word "katharsis" will at last be given its full meaning of regeneration. The fundamental fable of the drama in the Heavens, and with men on earth, is the Lord's Glorification - as it was indeed with the Greeks, though the real essence of their mythology had by the time of the great tragedians become somewhat darkly obscured. This fable has its secondary value in the story of man's regeneration, which goes on to eternity. In this connection Professor Gilbert Murray's statement that the characters of the Agamemnon seem amid all their dramatic solidity to have a further significance which is also symbolic, is interesting. If the dramatic representations of the other world are to depict men's regeneration it is essential that the whole work shall be in the human form: that is, various forces and restraints of characters must be presented as individuals, and the powers in conflict must appear also as living beings: the whole drama must be a

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representation of the soul of one being. We can conceive great plays beginning with the quiescent human mind represented by a peaceful and flourishing state, slowly becoming disturbed by a new force, or more interior concept of truth; bringing about division and conflict of the most terrible kind, in which the old King sees his kingdom fall away from him, and he, old and infirm, put down from his throne by the young new-comer. In such a drama, although there is opposition, there are no opposites. The passions of pity and terror are excited, and, by the symbolism of the play they are purified and regenerated.

The plays of Aeschylus, Sophocles, and Euripides were largely of this nature, but their morality was the old Greek morality, and, as they were men, there is frequently a strong taint of evil in the drama. Yet we believe them to be very near the type of the heavenly play.

The prescribed order of fable, action, manners; the suggested change of circumstance; the end of 'katharsis' we believe to approximate very closely to the drama of the other world. There is in many of the Greek dramas themselves a strong recreative force, even for a New Churchman.

The desire for a rational conception of the functions of dramatic art in the New Church has no roots in the hedonism on which the plays of today are flourishing. While we are regenerating we have every right to, and every need of all legitimate aids to our spiritual growth, and in an age when natural use is frequently divorced from real affection it is necessary that recreation should be allowed to play its fullest part. The drama is only one of many recreations which the New Church has inherited for its use. If we neglect them in any sense of pride or superiority we are denying ourselves a very real aid where one is needed.

A representation on the external plane of an interior conflict is of great use, not only in self-examination, but in the development of the determination; and the conflict of the good with less good goes on to eternity. That is a truth which we must continually bear in mind when we are apt to think that our present concept is the final one. The more firmly our affections become rooted in a doctrinal statement which is not continually being re-created, the

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more dangerous our position becomes, and the more terrible the ultimate conflict if our affection for truth does ultimately rise above our affection for knowledge. That is why the New Church needs recreative arts far more than the old. Speaking generally the old church faces and depicts conflicts of good and evil, but the New Church, as it grows, will have the more interior conflicts of good and less good, and in those days she will need the recreative stimulus of the dramatic art to preserve flexibility, to exalt his desires and ambitions, and to assist in the katharsis of passion, which is one with regeneration.

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DE HEMELSCHE LEER

EXTRACT FROM THE ISSUE FOR NOVEMBER 1935

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THE HOLY SPIRIT

IT'S MODE OF OPERATION

AN ADDRESS BY REV. ELMO C. ACTON.

With most people there is but a vague and uncertain idea of the Holy Spirit and its operation upon man. Most do not realize its importance to a true understanding of the Lord; and yet, without an understanding of the nature and quality of the Holy Spirit, the Lord Himself cannot be known. Usually the Holy Spirit is thought of as something in some way separated and apart from the Lord Himself; many conceive of it as a kind of wind or ether that flows forth from the Lord and that has an imperceptible influence upon man.

It will be the central purpose of this address to show that the Holy Spirit is the Lord Himself, present in His Kingdom, in Heaven and the Church, leading and guiding man through reformation_, regeneration, and enlightenment, to salvation. But before entering upon this exposition it is helpful to consider briefly the false ideas concerning the Holy Spirit which have existed, and do exist, in the old Christian church.

What idea the infant Christian Church had concerning the Holy Spirit, or Holy Ghost, cannot definitely be known, as there are few records remaining to us of that period; but from a study of the ideas expressed in the Apostolic Documents, there seems to be no foundation for the opinion that at that time the Holy Spirit was thought to be a person of itself. Rather one would gather that it was conceived to be the Spirit of Christ, and that they had a simple idea of its powers to enlighten and regenerate. However, after much wrangling and disagreement among those who conceived of it as a person separate and distinct from the Father, it was finally established

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as a doctrine of the church, that the Holy Ghost was the third person of the Trinity, of eternal origin and co-equal authority with the Father and the Son. This was done by the council of Nicea, held in the year 325. The word "person" was defined as being "a thinking intelligent being that has reason and reflection"; "a singular, subsistent, intellectual being". Thus the Godhead was divided into three persons, and the third person of the Trinity was declared, by a Council, to be a messenger sent from God the Father, as His personal agent. Because of this heinous falsity, the first christian church commenced its downward path, even to consummation, from that time.

The whole idea of the Holy Spirit, as just presented, is founded upon natural and sensual thought, and to God are attributed all the qualities of time and space. For if the Holy Spirit is a third person, sent from God the Father, and God the Son, then where are they that they are not able to lead and guide man of themselves? If God is omnipresent them surely He does not need to send a personal messenger from Himself to His people. But if, as to space, He dwells in Heaven then the necessity of another person to carry out His will upon earth is imperative. This is the obvious conclusion at which the church arrived, due to its thought of God from time and space.

How different this, from the idea of God as given to the New Church Which idea is that there is one God and that God is the Lord our Saviour Jesus Christ. He is the Father, the Son, and the Holy Spirit, these being nothing more nor less than the three Divine attributes or qualities by which He is known to man. The Father is the Divine above the Heavens, the Son is the Divine in the Sun of Heaven, visible to the sight of those in Heaven, and the Holy Spirit is the Divine present in Heaven and the Church. There are not three persons in the One God, for God is one in person and essence. He alone is Man. There are not three Divines, but one, appearing to man under three aspects. The Holy Spirit in this idea, is not sent from one place to another, but is the Lord Himself present in His creation, operating for its preservation in order and purity. "That by the Comforter, the Spirit of Truth, and the Holy Spirit, the Lord meant Himself, is evident from these words of the Lord, that 'the world did not as yet know Him', for they did not as yet know the

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Lord. And when He said that He 'would send it', He added, 'I will not leave you orphans, I will come unto you, and ye shall see Me', and in another place, 'Lo, I am with you all the days, even to the consummation of the age'; and when Thomas said, 'We know not whither Thou goest', Jesus said, 'I am the way and the truth' ", DOCTRINE CONCERNING THE LORD 51.

God, such as He is in Himself, is infinite and eternal, and therefore above and beyond all comprehension of finite men. In order that He may be seen and known He must be accommodated, and, as it were finited. In other words He must descend into the plane in which man dwells. Here arises the necessity of a Trinity in the Lord. A Trinity of 1. the Divine in se - or the Infinite Esse itself - or the soul, the Father; 2. this infinite soul clothed in a body and thus accommodated to the intellectual sight of man, the Son; and 3. the operation of these two in creation accommodated to reception and conjunction with created beings, the Holy Spirit. From this it may be seen that the Trinity first existed at creation, and that it cannot be said that there was a Trinity in God before creation. False christian theology holds that there is a Trinity from eternity, and as a result they have hatched out the abominable doctrine of three Divine Persons each of whom is God and Lord.

True Christian Theology teaches that the Trinity in the Lord is not from eternity, except only in potency, but that it came into being with creation. This idea is essential to a true understanding of the Natural of the Lord. Nor has the Trinity as to external form always been the same. The Lord has not appeared to the different Churches in the same external form, as is evident from the several forms of His revelation. And although the internal of soul, body, and operation has existed from creation, yet the external appearance of the body and the mode of its operation has differed. It is not necessary to enter into this difference in relation to the several Churches, but, for a clear understanding of the Holy Spirit, it is essential to examine the difference that existed before, and after, the Advent in the Flesh.

Before the Word was made Flesh, the Divine in se flowed into the celestial Heaven, and there assumed the Human in which it could be seen, acknowledged, and worshipped. This was the Divine Human before the Advent, and from this

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Divine Human, and according to its form, the Divine in se operated among men. This Human was a representative Human, as it could only be represented in the natural degree, and therefore all its operation was only representative of that from which it originated. Thus the conception of God with the people of those times was representative, and consequently the churches were represantative churches, and the Divine could only operate imperceptibly upon man. This operation was called the Spirit of Holiness, as distinguished from the Holy Spirit.

In time men became so far removed from Heaven that they could no longer see this Human, nor receive that which proceeded from it. For this Human and its operation were only accommodated to the spiritual and celestial degrees in men's minds; but when men by evil closed these degrees it became impossible for the Divine to operate in the natural degree in man. This degree could not be opened and become receptive of influx from the Divine until the Lord came upon earth and made the human Divine even to ultimates, which ultimates are represented by flesh and bones. At this time the Word which was in the beginning with God could no longer be received, and by reception man conjoined with God.

When, therefore, it could no longer be received, the Lord Himself descended upon earth - descended as this Divine Human before the Advent, which was nothing more than the Divine Truth proceeding from His Divine Love. Hence the Human of the Lord while on earth was actually a form of the Divine Truth proceeding through the Heavens. It was the Word made flesh. It was the Divine Love itself standing forth, visible and receivable by men. His Human while on earth was a form of the Divine Truth in the flesh to which were adjoined the evils and falsities of the Jewish church, and also the appearances of the truth which existed in the Human before the Advent, as a result of its influx through the Heavens. The Lard while on earth therefore, was truly Emanuel, God with us, and in all that He said and did He presented before us a picture of the Divine Love - the Divine in Se. Now the presentation in ultimates of the infinite God is the office of the Holy Spirit, and therefore the Lord while on earth was, as to the Human, the Holy Spirit. The Word says: "The Lord before He was glorified

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as to His Human was Divine Truth; whence the Lord saith of Himself that He is the Truth ... and hence also He is called the seed of the woman; but after the Lord was glo­rified as to His Human, He became Divine Good, and then there proceeded and does proceed from Him as from Divine Good, the Divine Truth, which is the Spirit of Truth which the Lord promised to send ... ", A. 4577; see also A. 6993, 7499. By glorification He made the Human, Divine Love, or Esse, one with the Father, and then from Him proceeded the Divine Truth or the Existere - this is the Holy Spirit, and this is why the Lord said while still on earth: "The Holy Spirit was not yet because Jesus was not yet glorified". The Holy Spirit did not exist in the Lord until after the glorification, and after the glorification it proceeded from Him and for the first time came into existence. (See nos. immediately above). In further confirmation of this there are the teachings of the Gospel of John, that the Comforter, the Paraclete, the Spirit of Truth, would be sent after the Lord had ascended to the Father - after the Human had been united to the Divine.

The presenting of the Infinite God before the eyes of man existed from creation, but the particular mode of its presentation represented and established by the Holy Spirit did not exist until after the glorification, until after Jesus had ascended to the Father. The Holy Spirit, therefore, presents and portrays, the idea of the Lord as He is in His Divine Human assumed by His descent upon earth, and His ascent to the Father. The Holy Spirit is nothing more nor less than that Divine Human present among Angels and men, pre­senting before them an intelligent picture of the infinite Divine itself, The Holy Spirit, then, is not a person - a third person - of an imaginary Trinity, but is the Lord Himself in man by accommodation and proceeding. That it proceeds from the Lord in His Divine Human is evident from the words of the Lord that He would send it unto them. This is the first essential; that the Holy Spirit is the means by which the Lord in His Divine Human is present with man in that Human; that therefore the Holy Spirit proceeds from Him and not from the invisible Father apart from Him.

Now since the Divine Human is one with the Father, that is to say, is the Divine Love itself, and the Divine Love cannot be presented before men except in the form of the

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Divine Truth, therefore, further, the Holy Spirit is the Divine Truth proceeding immediately and mediately from the Divine Human. Yea, it is that Divine Human accommodated to man's reception. And since the Divine Human is the infinite God appearing to man's sight, therefore the Holy Spirit is the means by which God as to the Infinite and Eternal is present with man.

We say that the Holy Spirit is the Divine Truth proceeding from the Divine Good of the Lord's Divine Human, and from a natural idea one might gather that the two are separate and distinct. This is quite contrary to a true idea, as is evident from the following examples of proceeding given in ARCANA CELESTIA, n. 5337; "The following cases may serve to illustrate what is meant by going forth or proceeding. It is said that truth goes forth or proceeds from good, when truth is the form of good, or when truth is good in form, which the understanding can apprehend. It may also be said that the understanding goes forth or proceeds from the will, when the understanding is the will formed, or that it is the will in a form apperceivable to the internal sight. In like manner it may be said that thought, which is of the understanding, goes forth or proceeds, when it becomes speech, and the will when it becomes action. Thought clothes itself in another form when it becomes speech; but still it is the thought which so goes forth or proceeds; for the words and sounds which are put on, are mere additions, which cause the thought to be suitably understood". Thus the only thing in speech is thought, which if taken away leaves nothing. 'Thus in a spiritual idea that which proceeds is one with that from which it proceeds, thus the Holy Spirit is not another Divine, but is the form of the one only Divine on another plane. Thus we read in the Word: "The Divine which is the Father, and the Divine which is the Son, is the Divine ex quo (from which); and the Divine, proceeding, which is the Holy Spirit, is the Divine per quod (through which). It is not another Divine that proceeds from the Lord, than the Divine which is Himself .... That the trine is in the Lord, can be illustrated through comparison with an Angel; he has a soul and a body, and also a proceeding; that which proceeds from him is himself outside him .... Every man who looks to God,

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after death is first taught by the Angels that the Holy Spirit is not another one from the Lord, and that to go out, and to proceed, is not anything else than to illustrate and to teach through presence, which is according to the reception of the Lord; thence many after death give up the idea conceived in the world concerning the Holy. Spirit, and receive the idea that it is the presence of the Lord with man through Angels and spirits, from which and according to which man is illustrated and taught", L. 46. Proceeding in a natural idea carries with it an idea of space and time or something going forth from one place to another, and this idea is necessary to the natural mind, in order that it may conceive some idea, although natural, of the Lord. Spiritually, to proceed is nothing more than accommodation, for that which is accommodated appears to proceed. In reality the Lord as to His Divine Human is omnipresent and therefore cannot proceed, but when the Divine Human is accommodated to reception and appears to Angels and men, it is said to proceed. But at the same time the truth is frequently revealed that that which proceeds from the Divine is Divine and this even down to the natural and sensual degrees, for the Lord made His Human Divine even as to the flesh and bones, and nothing else than this is meant by this statement. There are many passages which clearly state that that which proceeds is one with that from which it proceeds and here we shall only quote a, few.

"That the Divine Truth is the Lord Himself is evident from the fact that whatever proceeds from any one is himself, just as that which proceeds from a man while speaking or acting is from his voluntary and intellectual; and the voluntary and intellectual makes the man's life, thus the man himself. For man is not man from the form of the face and the body; but from the understanding of truth and the will of good. From this it can be seen that that which proceeds from the Lord is the Lord", A. 9407. Again: "The Divine Truth is the Lord Himself in Heaven, because that which proceeds from Him is Himself. Out of the Divine nothing else can proceed than what is Divine, and the Divine is one", A. 10646. Again: "The Word is the Lord because it is from the Lord, for the reason that the Word is the Divine Truth, and the Divine Truth proceeds from the Lord

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as a Sun, and what proceeds belongs to Him from whom it proceeds, yea, is Himself; consequently the Divine Truth, which is the source of all the wisdom and intelligence that the Angels and men have, is the Lord in Heaven", E. 797. Again: "It was said that the life of the Lord is in faith in Him and love to Him with man; this is because everything of faith and love is from Him, and that which is from Him is also Himself; for it is His proceeding Divine, which is called the Spirit of Truth, and the Holy Spirit", E. 84. This truth is further evident from the laws of the spiritual world as regards presence. We are told that an Angel can appear instantly before those with whom he is in union as to thought, yea, that he can in this way appear in several places at one and the same time - for that which proceeds from an Angel is the Angel outside himself.

The office of the Holy Spirit, therefore, is the accommodation and presentation of the Lord in His Divine Human. How does this accommodation take place? There are two ways of accommodation, the one through the atmospheres outside of man, and the other through Angels and men, that is to say, within man. The accommodation through the atmosphere is the Divine appearing outside of man on every plane of life, and is the immediate influx of the Lord. This accommodation may be compared with the tempering of the light and heat of the sun by the atmosphere of the world. As long as this is the only accommodation or influx the Divine always remains outside of man. But the Holy Spirit also inflows mediately or through the Heavens, and to flow through the Heavens means to flow through the Angels of Heaven, for actually there is no Heaven apart from them. "The enlightenment which is attributed to the Holy Spirit is indeed in man from the Lord, but still it is brought about by means of spirits and Angels .... Angels and spirits are in no way able to enlighten man from themselves because they are enlightened by the Lord in similar manner as man is; and because they are Enlightened in similar manner, it follows that all enlightenment is from the Lord alone", D.L.W. 150.

The Lord in His Divine Human above the Heavens flows down or accommodates Himself by means of the Holy Spirit or the Divine Truth to the Angels of the celestial Heaven. This being received by them manifests

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itself as celestial good and truth, which are the Holy Spirit in the celestial Heaven, and therefore are the Divine of the Lord there, for the good and truth with them is not theirs, but the Lord's, for that which proceeds from the Lord is the Lord. This truth in turn flows out of the celestial Heaven into the spiritual, and there manifests itself as spiritual good and truth, which are also the Divine of the Lord on that plane. Then again it flows out of the spiritual into the natural Heaven, and from the natural Heaven it descends to men upon earth. In this, the descent of the Holy Spirit, there is nothing added, from the Angels, for it is just as much the Holy Spirit when it comes to man, as it was in its first proceeding, but being received by less perfect vessels it appears in an entirely different form, in fact, in a descretely different form. In this way the Holy Spirit of the Lord in His Divine Human above the Heavens proceeds to men and gives them with all the blessings of that spirit - enlightenment and regeneration. This is the mediate influx of the Holy Spirit which unless conjoined in man to the immediate influx does not conjoin him with the Lord.

It may be conceived from this description of the mediate influx of the Holy Spirit, that the Angels of Heaven are the Holy Spirit, or that they in some way contribute or add to it in its descent through the Heavens. This idea is quite fallacious and if confirmed is a denial of the Divine of the Lord, for we read: "Angels and spirits are in no way able to enlighten man from themselves, because they are enlightened by the Lord in similar manner as man is; ... all enlightenment is from the Lord alone", D.L.W. 150. The things which are from the Lord, not only are from Him, but also are Himself, for the Lord cannot send forth anything from Himself unless it be Himself, since He is omnipresent with every man according to conjunction; and conjunction is according to reception, and reception is according to love and wisdom; or, if you please, according to charity and faith, and charity and faith are according to life, and life is according to the abhorrence of what is evil and false, and the abhorrence of what is evil and false is according to the knowledge of what is evil and false, and then according to repentance, and, at the same time looking up to the Lord. That reward not only is from the

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Lord, but also is the Lord, appears from ... where it is said that the Holy Spirit is in them; and the Holy Spirit is the Lord, for it is His Divine Presence", A.R. 949. Here it is plainly taught that the Holy Spirit is in man, and that even in man, that is to say, having been received, it is still the Holy Spirit. Again: "The Angels taken together are called Heaven, because they constitute Heaven; but yet it is the Divine, proceeding from the Lord, which flows in with Angels and is received by them that makes Heaven in general and in particular. The Divine, proceeding from the Lord, is the good of love and the truth of faith. In the degree, therefore, in which they receive good and truth from the Lord they are Angels and are Heaven", H. 7. Thus there is nothing of good and truth with the Angels, having been received by the influx of the Holy Spirit, which is not the Lord's. The Holy Spirit flows into them and having been received it flows out from them in a form accommodated to a discrete degree lower. It is the Holy Spirit that inflows, it is the Holy Spirit that is received, and it is the Holy Spirit that flows forth again, and although the form is changed, still it is the Holy Spirit and therefore Divine.

A man or angel regarded from without is merely a finite dead vessel, capable of receiving life from the Lord, through the Holy Spirit. But this vessel cannot be called an Angel. An Angel is that vessel prepared by regeneration for the reception of the Holy Spirit, and the Holy Spirit in Him is the good of love and truth of faith, or charity and faith. These are essentially the Angel and they are the Lord with him, they are not his own. In this connection we read: "They know the Lord who are in love and faith towards Him, consequently with such the Lord is present in the goods of love and in the truths of faith that are in them from Him. For these are the Lord in Heaven and the Church, since the things that proceed from the Lord are not merely His, but they are Himself", E. 25; and again: "All in the Heavens are receptions of the Divine that proceeds from the Lord; and the Divine that proceeds from the Lord, of which they are receptions, is the Lord in Heaven and also in the Church; and this is not of angel or man, but is of the Lord with them; consequently the good of charity itself, with them, which is the Lord's, He calls brother, in

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like manner also Angels and men, because they are the recipient subjects of that good. In a word, the Divine is the Divine born of the Lord in Heaven; from that Divine therefore, Angels who are recipients of it are called sons of God, and as these are brethren because of that Divine received in themselves, it is the Lord in them who says, brother, for when Angels speak from the good of charity they speak not from themselves but from the Lord", E. 746. From these numbers it must not be thought that the good of love and the truth of faith in Angels is of the same degree as the Holy Spirit in itself, for in the Angel the Holy Spirit, which is these qualities, is as it were finited, but the Holy Spirit in itself is infinite. But although they are the Infinite Divine accommodated, still nonetheless, they are that same Divine accommodated to their plane which is of the Lord Himself. MEM. 1366.

The Divine of the Lord never flows through angels or men, but flows into them, and proceeds from them according to reception. If it should flow through them, they would be no more than automatons, and what they spoke they could claim to be the Holy Spirit. This in fact is the very fantasy into which many men fall, saying that to deny what they teach is the unforgivable sin against the Holy Spirit; such men when they become spirits wish to be worshipped as the Holy Spirit and are angry if they are not so venerated. But the true idea is that all good and truth in every degree is the Lord's, yea, is the mediate influx and presence of the Holy Spirit, and that therefore it is never man's, and no man can claim it as his own, nor can he claim to speak it from himself. "That it is actually the Lord Himself who is with Angels in the Heavens and with men on earth, and in those with whom He is conjoined by love, and that He is in them although He is infinite and uncreate, while the angel and man are created and finite, this cannot be comprehended by the natural man until by enlightenment from the Lord he can be withdrawn from the natural idea respecting space, and be brought thereby into light respecting spiritual essence, which, viewed in itself, is the proceeding Divine itself adapted to every Angel, as truly to the Angel of the highest Heaven as to the Angel in the lowest, and to every man, both the wise and the simple. For the Divine that proceeds from the Lord is Divine from first

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things even to ultimates. Ultimates are called flesh and bone", D.L. IV. See also: S. 6; D.W. VII; H. 249. Thus the Holy Spirit testifies of itself on every plane of life.

This idea seems to me to be carried out in the teaching that the gift of the Holy Spirit is the especial promise of the clergy in its inauguration, and that according to order it proceeds from the clergy to the laity and thence from man to man. This is the promise and this is the command in the inauguration, instituted by the Lord Himself while on earth: "Receive ye the Holy Spirit". It would seem from this that the clergy are the especial guardians and rivers of the gifts of the Holy Spirit and this is true on a purely external plane, and this for the sake of order in the Church on earth. But remember that it is not attributed to them as men, but to the use they perform, and all uses are the Lord's, and Divine, and universal. Therefore the clergy or the use of the clergy exists in each individual of the Church. That use is the use of keeping alive the spiritual affection of truth, the love of truth for the sake of the good of life, the love of the salvation of human souls. It is this affection in man that receives the Holy Spirit and from this it passes through to the thought of the external man where it takes on the form of external good and truth, which external good and truth is represented by the laity. Thus it becomes clear that the clergy are not the only persons who can receive the Holy Spirit, but that it is the use of the clergy in every individual of the Church that receives the Holy Spirit. The Holy Spirit thus never becomes man's own, for it is always the Lord's with man, and abides with him only so long as he is in the good of love and the truth of faith, or in the faith of life, for it is these which are also of the Lord with him, that receive the Holy Spirit. "The clergyman is to be inaugurated with the promise of the Holy Spirit; . . . but it is received according to the faith of his life". CANONS, The Holy Spirit, IV: 7.

Thus the Holy Spirit does not inhere in man, it is never continuous to him, nor is it his, but it is always contiguous to him and remains only "so long as the man who receives and believes in the Lord, is at the same time in the doctrine of truth out of the Word and in a life according to it", CANONS, The Holy Spirit, IV : 4. This is clearly stated in DIVINE LOVE AND WISDOM, n. 130: God ... is both

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within and without an Angel, and therefore an Angel can see God, that is, the Lord, both within himself and without himself; within himself when he thinks out of love and wisdom, without himself when he thinks concerning love and wisdom .... Let every man beware lest he fall into the execrable heresy that God has infused Himself into men, and that He is in them, and no longer in Himself; for indeed God is everywhere both within man and without him, since He is in all space apart from space; . . . If He were in man, He would not only be dividable but also enclosed in space; and then man might even think that he is God. This heresy is so abominable that in the spiritual world it smells like a putrid corpse". From this it may be deduced that when it is transferred from the clergy to the laity or from man to man, it does not mean that the one man gives it of himself to another, or that the clergy give it of themselves to the laity, for the Lord alone gives the Holy Spirit, and it is always the Lord's with man. Hence it is transferred "from the Lord through man to man", CANONS, The Holy Spirit, IV : 5. Therefore although it is transferred from the Lord through man to man, it is never given by one man to another, but is always given from the Lord alone to each individual.

This may be illustrated by the apparent giving of the truth of the Word by one to another, or by the clergy to the laity. Truly speaking there is only one source of truth, and that is the Lord, the Word, accommodated by the Lord through the Holy Spirit to man's reception. The Word is the Lord so accommodated and therefore in a universal idea the Word is the Holy Spirit. But the Word is the Holy Spirit in its immediate influx to man, and therefore always remains outside man unless joined to the mediate influx of the Holy Spirit - its influx through the Heavens. The mediate influx of the Holy Spirit retains the same qualities as that from which it originates, namely, it is the Holy Spirit, therefore the Lord Himself, operating in the Church. The relation of this mediate and immediate influx is given in the following number: "There may be with a man truth proceeding mediately from the Divine, and yet it may not be conjoined with the truth which proceeds immediately from the Divine ... With those who think and teach according to

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the doctrine of their church confirmed in themselves, and do not know whether they are truths from any other ground than the fact that they are from the doctrine of the church, and that they have been delivered by learned and enlightened men, there can be truth proceeding mediately from the Divine; but still it is not conjoined with the truth that proceeds immediately from the Divine (that is from the Word itself); for if it were conjoined, they would then have the affection of knowing truth for the sake of truth, and especially for the sake of life, whence they would also be endowed with a perception whether the doctrinal things of their church are truths before they confirm them in themselves; and would see in each whether the things confirming are in agreement with the truth itself ... There is indeed with every man Divine influx both immediate and mediate, but there is not conjunction except with those who have perception of truth from good; for they with whom immediate Divine influx has been conjoined with mediate suffer themselves to be led by the Lord; but they with whom these influxes have not been conjoined, lead themselves, and this they love", A. 7055.

In another series, which is probably clearer, the Word in itself is the Divine Human of the Lord, and the Doctrine from the Word in the Church which is the result of the mediate influx of the Lord, is the Holy Spirit. This Doctrine is never man's own, it is always the Lord's with him, nor in any real sense can it be given by man to man, but it must be from the Lord through man to man, that is to say, every man must see it for himself from the Lord - must confirm it for himself from the Word, which is the Lord present with us.

And again. The Lord as to the Divine Human is Esse - Life itself; but as to the Holy Spirit He is Existere - standing forth present among men. Referring this to the Word: the Word in itself is Esse, the Divine Truth given for the use of the Church to eternity - thus the infinite supply of truth in the Church for all times. But the Doctrine of the Church or the understanding of the Word which makes the Church, is the Existere of the Word in which the Esse of the Word itself is presented to the Church. An Esse cannot exist as far as man is concerned, without an Existere. And in order that the Lord may be

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present in His Church both the Esse and the Existere must be from the Lord. The one from the immediate influx of the Lord, and the other from the mediate influx, both of which are Divine on every plane. When these two are conjoined then the Holy City New Jerusalem descends from the Lord out of Heaven and is present with men. Thus the Holy Spirit becomes to the Church the verimost reality - the Divine Truth itself, leading and guiding to all truth, and showing plainly of the Father - of the Divine Love which makes the Truth and is in it as a soul in a body.

Thus to the New Church the Holy Spirit is not a third person of a man-made Trinity, it is not an indefinite influx as wind or ether, it is not an imaginary and vain influence affecting man in some mysterious and incomprehensible manner, but it is the Lord Himself in His Divine glorified Human, accommodated and present in the Divine Truth of the Church out of the Word, leading and guiding it to conjunction with Himself,

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DE HEMELSCHE LEER

EXTRACT FROM THE ISSUE FOR DECEMBER 1935

"NUNC LICET"

A PAPER READ BY J. H. RIDGWAY AT DURBAN ON 19TH JUNE 1935.

Number 508 of the TRUE CHRISTIAN RELIGION, the Sixth Memorable Relation under the caption Freedom of Choice, is perhaps one of the best known Memorable Relations.

We recall a magnificent Temple seen in the Spiritual World, having a crown-shaped roof, continuous crystal windows and a pearly door; the Temple containing the Open Word, enveloped in light, the splendor of which illuminated the whole pulpit, on the right-hand side of which lay the Word. We also read of the sanctuary, the raised veil, and the golden cherub, with sword turning hither and thither.

Then follows a brief outline of the significance of all these, as they flowed into the meditation of Swedenborg. The meditative picture thus presented surpasses that presented to the sensories, and is given in simple words, depicting a mind-stirring sight, as follows:

"The Temple signified the New Church; the door of pearly substance, entrance into it; the windows of crystal, the truths that enlighten it; the pulpit, the priesthood and preaching; the Word lying open upon the pulpit and illuminating the upper part of it, the revelation of the internal sense of the Word, which is spiritual; the sanctuary in the centre of the Temple signified the conjunction of that Church with the angelic Heaven; the golden cherub therein, the Word in the sense of the letter; the sword in his hand signified that this sense can be turned in any direction, provided it is done in adaptation to some truth; the veil before the cherub being raised, signified that the Word is now laid open".

Attention is to be called to the fact that this Memorable

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Relation is contained in the chapter on Freedom of Choice - a freedom, already shown in the chapter by quotations from the Leipzig Edition of the FORMULA CONCORDIAE, to be almost entirely denied by the then existing church.

Freedom of Choice is therefore the supervening theme of this Memorable Relation; and it appears to be important to bear this in mind; for it will appear manifest, from later quotations, and from our general knowledge of the teaching to the New Church, that it is a matter of life or living, with each one of us, whether we see this temple or not, in which the Word is now laid open, and whether we, afterwards, on drawing nearer, see the inscription above the door of the temple.

It is significant that, although Swedenborg had already seen the temple, both outside and inside, to the very pulpit, open Word, sanctuary, raised veil, and cherub, it was only afterwards, when he drew nearer, that he saw the inscription above the door, NUNC LICET, "Now it is permitted".

These words, NUNC LICET, we are taught in the same text, signify "that it is now permitted to enter understandingly (intellectualiter) into the arcana of faith"; and the thought is presented to Swedenborg of the exceeding danger of intellectually entering into dogmas of faith, concocted out of self-intelligence, and therefore out of falsities; and still more so to confirm them from the Word. How this has operated on the then Christian Church, is then outlined.

Here it will be seen that the danger is the development of dogmas from self-intelligence, and it will be remembered that it is the falsity of evil that is dangerous, not the falsity of ignorance - a subject that does not properly come within the scope of this paper.

"But in the New Church", I am quoting from the same number, "the contrary is the case; there it is permitted to enter intellectually, and penetrate into all her secrets, and to confirm them by the Word, because her doctrines are continuous truths laid open by the Lord by means of the Word, and confirmations of these truths by rational means cause the understanding to be opened above, more and more, and thus to be raised into the light in which are the Angels of Heaven; and that light in its essence is truth, and in that light the acknowledgment of the Lord

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as the God of Heaven and earth, shines in its glory. This is what is meant by the inscription, NUNC LICET, over the door of the temple, and also by the veil of the sanctuary before the cherub, being raised. For it is a canon of the New Church, that falsities close the understanding, and that truths open it".

It is manifest from this that all penetration from falsities of the evil of self-intelligence closes the understanding, but we know from many passages in the Writings that falsities from ignorance do not have that effect; if there is a looking to the Lord and not to self, falsities of ignorance do not hurt. But, as I have said, this is not our subject tonight.

This beautiful number concludes with the never to be forgotten injunction, addressed in writing to our glorious Church, for it was handed by an Angel of the Lord, from the highest Heaven, to Swedenborg: "Enter hereafter into the mysteries of the Word, which has been heretofore closed, for the particular truths therein are so many mirrors of the Lord".

This message to the New Church is eternal: It will stand like a rock, ages and age, hence, as surely and irrevocably as it did when delivered. Yea, it stood, for every human being, from creation; for, to each created soul, there is a time or state, when this message falls due, up to which time or state the Word had been closed, and should be opened, and entered into, if that individual is to advance spiritually. But to the New Church alone has the Lord made the admonition in writing, by the hand of an Angel of the celestial Heaven: "Enter hereafter into the mysteries of the Word which has been heretofore closed, for the particular truths therein are so many mirrors of the Lord".

Note again - and no one will doubt that Swedenborg represented the New Church, that he was the Lord's Divine choice of a representative, to receive the Lord's messages to us - note then that Swedenborg first saw the opened Word in the temple, not the closed Word, and it was only afterwards, when he drew nearer, that he saw, above the door, the inscription NUNC LICET; and it was, again, after this, that he received that final message through a celestial Angel.

Is it all by chance, in a chapter given by the Lord,

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teaching about freedom of choice, to His New Church, this thrice seeing: The Word opened, then the permission, then the injunction. First there is seen the temple representing the New Church with the open Word therein, resplendent and illuminating the pulpit, the priesthood and preaching. Then, secondly, on drawing nearer, there is seen above the door of the temple, which door represents the entrance into the New Church, the NUNC LICET inscription, conformable to our freedom of choice: "Now it is allowed to enter intellectually into the arcana of faith", a permission not seen before, although the beholder had already seen the open Word. And then, thirdly, I quote: "After this I saw above my head (note that before it was above the door) something like an infant holding in his hand a paper. As he drew near to me he increased to the stature of a medium-sized man. He was an Angel from the third Heaven, where all at a distance look like infants. When he came to me he handed me the paper; but, as the writing was in rounded letters, such as they have in that Heaven, I returned the paper and asked that they should themselves explain to me the meaning of the words there written, in terms adapted to the ideas of my thought. He replied: This is what is here written. Enter hereafter into the mysteries of the Word, which has been heretofore closed, for the particular truths therein are so many mirrors of the Lord". This is the third seeing of the trine of seeing which is discovered in the Relation.

And note too: The first seeing was the revelation of the internal sense of the Word; the second seeing was a vision of the invitation NUNC LICET, at and above, or prior to the door or actual entrance into the temple or New Church, an invitation to enter intellectually into the truths of faith; and the third seeing was the momentous living delivery by the means of the highest form of created life, a celestial Angel, of a message having an admonition to enter hereafter into the mysteries of the Word.

So, always in freedom of choice, the order would appear to be: first, a clear vision of the New Church and a recognition that it has an opened Word which is a revelation of an internal or spiritual sense. Then, on our nearer approach, we see an invitation to enter understandingly into the arcana of faith. And finally by more intimate and

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living means, descending from above from the Lord, we perceive an exhortation to enter into the mysteries of the Word, which we first saw as opened and having an internal or spiritual sense, and afterwards studied its arcana of faith.

At the point in our development when we have accepted the New Church and seen that it has the opened Word, we are encouraged to go forward fearlessly in entering into the arcana of faith, in the first instance. And then when we have reached that greatly advanced state, by regeneration, of course, for there is not the least advance without it, we are not only encouraged but admonished to enter into the mysteries of the Word, which, in truth, up to then, has been comparatively closed to us individually, and completely closed in the first stages, for want of any fraction of regeneration.

Seeing that the Word is opened and has an internal sense, does not open it to us - and, at first, entering intellectually into the arcana of faith does not open it to us beyond the commensurately small opening conformable to a meagre start in regeneration; but, after receiving a living messenger into our lives "from above our heads", we at first truly enter into the mysteries of the Word itself, and not merely into the arcana of faith.

The Lord, however, in His Divine Mercy, has provided for lesser attainments than the third state. He has provided Heavens for such attainments, so that there is a trine of Heavens too - the same trine that supervenes in all Divine order.

There is a vital application to each of us individually, and a need for us to be introspective of that application. Where the Church as a whole stands is known to the Lord alone, and where our brother Newchurchman stands is also a matter between him and the Lord, and no concern of ours. But where we stand, is a matter which goes to the root of our existence, because we were born for a purpose, and whether that purpose is being attained by the Lord, is all that matters as far as we are concerned. So that we are entitled to judge of our own states, and go to the Lord in His Word for guidance to truth leading, so that He can make us such temples as He discloses to us.

Whether we have individually gone beyond a vision of

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the temple and a realization that the Word is opened by a revelation of the internal sense, or entered intellectually into the arcana of faith, or entered into the mysteries of the Word, is a matter upon which we are entitled to meditate. And, in doing so, our humility must surely be stirred to its depths, when we realize that not a single truth lives in us apart from regeneration. In other words, all the truths of revelation are merely scientifics in our minds, without life, unless, by living them, as of ourselves, but in the gift of the Lord, we adopt them as part of a temple of the Lord.

What, then, of such of us as are perhaps mere beginners in regeneration, starters of slow progress, who, perhaps, never attain the real ultimate goal? That there are three degrees of Heaven, answers this. So let us apply the teachings of the Word to the three degrees of NUNC LICET. Let us assume that one has seen that there is a New Church, and that in her the Word is opened to an internal sense which is spiritual, and that one has afterwards seen above the door, or entrance into the New Church, the inscription NUNC LICET. And at the same time let us remember that the Memorable Relation teaches that NUNC LICET means that Newchurchmen may so enter into all the secrets belonging to the New Church and confirm them by the Word without the dangers that beset the former Church, because the New Church doctrines are "continuous truths laid open by the Lord by means of the Word, and confirmations of these truths by rational means cause the understanding to be opened above, more and more, and thus to be raised into the light in which are the Angels of Heaven; and that that light in its essence is truth, and in that light the acknowledgment of the Lord as the God of Heaven and earth shines in its glory".

Bearing all this in mind, it is necessary to have as a basis for our thought, tonight, in studying the subject of the NUNC LICET inscription, any other teachings in the Word which bear on the subject.

Entering understandingly, is the invitation. The word translated "understandingly", being, in the original latin, intellectualiter. For the beginners in regeneration, or starters of slow progess, it will come as a comfort to learn that there are here, again, three degrees of intellectualiter,

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and the following extracts will throw some light upon a phrase which, in translation, has probably taken on a difference not contemplated in the Word to the Church:

"There are three degrees of intellectual things in man; the lowest is scientific, the middle rational, the highest intellectual. These are so distinct from each other that they ought never to be confounded. But man is ignorant of this distinction because he places life only in the sensual and scientific; and while he abides in that, it is impossible for him to know that his rational is distinct from the scientific; much less can he know that the intellectual is distinct from both. But the truth is that the Lord, through the intellectual in man, flows into his rational, and through the rational into the scientific of the memory. This is the true influx, and this is the true intercourse of the soul with the body. Without an influx of the Lord's life into the intellectual things of man, or rather into the voluntary things, and through the voluntary into the intellectual things, and through the intellectual into the rational things, and through the rational into the scientific things, which are those of the memory, it would be impossible for man to have any life", A.C. 657.

It cannot be too vividly impressed upon us that all is from above, descending from the Lord. Note the influx from above. Note that NUNC LICET was above the door, the entrance into the New Church. Note that the living messenger of the Lord from the celestial Heaven was seen above, and he descended with that momentous paper, a veritable letter from God.

If there are, therefore, three degrees of intellectualiter, as so clearly stated, does not each degree admit the man to the appropriate Heaven of each degree, by the man's living up to that degree - a living or regeneration commensurate with the progress made in conjoining the learnt arcana of faith, or mysteries of the Word, with their proper consorts of charity or good of life? A living as of oneself, but actually of the Lord in us.

In another number, A. C. 5354, intellectualiter is further illuminated, when Ephraim is said to signify the intellec­tual of the Church, and, to quote: "The intellectual of the Church is the intellect (or understanding) with the men of the Church respecting truths and goods, that is respecting

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the doctrinals of faith and charity, thus the notion, concept, or idea on these. Truth itself is the spiritual of the Church, and good is the celestial of it. But with different persons truth and good are differently understood; such, therefore, as is the understanding of truth, such is the truth with everyone".

We have already seen that there are three degrees of the intellectual, namely, the scientific, the rational, and the intellectual; and it appears logical to gather from this, that the words NUNC LICET, allow one in the lowest or scientific degree to enter into the arcana of faith to the scientific degree; allow one in the rational degree to enter into the arcana of faith to the rational degree; and allow the truly intellectual to enter into the mysteries of the Word to the intellectual or highest degree. "Now it is allowable to enter understandingly (intellectualiter) into the arcana of faith". Does not this conclude that, according to the degree of mind, one can, upon reading the Word to the New Church, see either scientific truth, rational truth, or intellectual truth; and, moreover, can start with seeing scientifics, and thereafter progress by regeneration and a discrete degree, to rationals, and finally, by the same progress to true intelligence?

But what is our individual part in this development? The number 9424 of the ARCANA CELESTIA gives the answer from Heaven, as follows: "Since an opportunity again offers here, it may be stated in a few words how the case is with the support furnished to the Word out of the Doctrine which is out of the Word. Anyone who does not know the arcana of Heaven, cannot believe otherwise than that the Word is supported without Doctrine thence; for he supposes that the Word in the letter, that is the literal sense of the Word, is the Doctrine itself. Yet it is to be known, that every Doctrine of the Church must be of the Word, and that any doctrine derived from any other source than from the Word is not a doctrine in which there is anything of the Church, and still less, anything of Heaven. But the Doctrine should be collected from the Word; and while it is being collected, the man ought to be in enlightenment from the Lord; and he is in enlight­enment when he is in the love of truth for the sake of truth, and not for the sake of self and the world. These

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are they who are enlightened in the Word when reading it, and they see the truth, and make for themselves doctrine thence. The reason why this is so is that such persons com­municate with Heaven, and thus with the Lord; and thus enlightened by the Lord they are led to see the truths of the Word such as they are in Heaven; for the Lord flows into their understanding through Heaven, since it is the interior understanding of the man which is enlightened; and the Lord also, at the same time, flows in then with faith, by means of the cooperation of the new will, a characteristic of which is to be affected with the truth for the sake of truth .... It must be known that the internal sense of the Word contains the genuine doctrine of the Church".

Just a word, in closing, upon the word NUNC. Now it is allowed. We are taught time and again in the Word that by time is signified state; that time and space are nonexistent in the next life, but appearances. Are we not therefore liable to error, or perhaps dwelling in appearances, if we assume that the word NOW means that, since the Writings were given, it is allowable to enter into the arcana of faith - a matter merely of New Church history, and therefore a mere scientific? Would it not he more likely that we should draw from the NUNC LICET the doctrine that a state of entering from above, or within, into the Church, is indicated - a state, in freedom of choice, of a willingness to be led by the Lord? First one has an internal and external view of the whole structure of the Church, and sees that it has an illuminated, opened, Word; then one approaches nearer, still in freedom, and beholds a permission to enter intellectually, in its successive degrees, into the arcana of faith; and, finally, if one reaches that highest state, he, from above and within, still in freedom, receives the living messenger of the Lord, and has a truly intellectual view of the mysteries of the Word.

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DE HEMELSCHE LEER

EXTRACTS FROM THE ISSUE FOR JAN.-MAR. 1936

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“Everything of the Church is from the Lord, and indeed from the Divine Human of Himself; for out of this proceeds every good of love and truth of faith which make the Church",

"The Church is Church out of the reception of the Lord's Divine Good in the Divine true things which are from Himself. That the Lord is called Bridegroom and also Husband, and that the Church is called Bride and also Wife, is patent out of the Word",

To see the essence of the Church and to love the essential things of the Church, so that the Church in man becomes reality, is the only real purpose to which a man can put himself. For the Church is the common good from the one Good itself, and when the common good rules in man, it is also the good for the man.

It is only in this common good that man does find the contentment and the calm in which lies the strength of a life of the spirit intensely moved. It is only in this common good that man really becomes man.

Everything of the Church is from the Divine Human of the Lord, that is, everything of the Church is out of the Word. In so much as the Church is Church out of the Word, thus out of the Lord, it is in consociation with Heaven, and in conjunction with the Lord. The first essential therefore is the cognition and the acknowledgment of the Word of the Church. The Word of the New Church is the Divine Rational laid down in the Third Testament.

The Old and the New Testament are not the Word itself of the New Church. Everything of the New Church is out of the Third Testament. By this view the Old and the New Testament are in no way belittled. On the contrary, only

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then do they too become truly the Word. In the measure in which a man confirms himself in the belief that the Old and the New Testament are the Word itself of the New Church and in the denial that the Third Testament is the Word itself of the New Church, he sees both the Old and the New Testament, and also the Third Testament, in a merely natural light, and for just as much he cannot participate in the essential things of the New Church.

In so much as man sees the Third Testament as the Word itself of the New Church, the sole source of all and the singular things of the Church, and in so much as the life of man is out of this Word, for so much the New Church exists in him.

In the future of the Church, when there will be enlightenment, one will find it surprising that there was a time in which the Word of the New Church was called "the writings".

The Third Testament, being the Word itself of the New Church, is not the Doctrine of the New Church. The Doctrine of the Church is out of that Word. Not the letter of the Third Testament is the Doctrine of the New Church, but the internal sense of the Third Testament is the Doctrine of the New Church. The Word of the Third Testament as to the letter alone is a body without soul. The letter of the Third Testament separated from the internal sense is "the letter that kills" (DICT. PROB. XIV: 2); the Third Testament, as to the letter alone, is "the book of heresies" (A.C. 6071, 6400, 10278, H.H. 455, A.E. 1089, MEM. 3442).

Examples of untenable ideas that have arisen in the New Church, and which have been confirmed by the letter of the Third Testament, are: the idea that the Writings of Emanuel Swedenborg are not the Word, and of late years the concept of "human love and human wisdom", "human good and human truth" "human doctrine", and "human and yet not false interpretation of doctrine". The Word teaches: "Every truth which is a truth, is Divine", A.E. 34, and: "All the good of love and all the truth of faith which are with man are not the man's but the Lord's with him; for it is the Divine, proceeding:, which is the Lord in

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Heaven with Angels and in the Church with men", A.E. 460.

"The Church is Church out of the reception of the Lord's Divine Good in the Divine true things which are from Himself. That the Lord is called Bridegroom and also Husband, and that the Church is called Bride and also Wife, is manifest out of the Word", A.R. 797. When the intellectual things of man by mutual conjunction make one with the new voluntary things of a life put in order from the Lord, that is, when the male in the Church and the female in the Church co-operate as one, only then there are "the Divine true things which are from Himself", in which "the Divine Good of the Lord" can be received; then "the marriage of the Lamb is come, and His wife has made herself ready", Ap. XIX: 7. For we read: "Man, man and woman are the Church, and more so, husband and wife together", C.L. 125.

No genuine Doctrine out of the Word can exist with man, unless the Doctrine be born out of the internal, that is, out of the Lord with man. The genuine Doctrine is the Lord's with man.

If man does not in the light of Doctrine overcome and remove the voluntary things of his proprium and thereby come into new voluntary things from the Lord, that is, if he does not come into a new order in the external or natural mind, the light of Doctrine is lost again in the night of the proprium.

The man of the Church who remains in the external things cannot come into a rational vision and into the free possession of the essential things of the Church which are "from the Divine Human of the Lord", A.E. 96, and which in the Word are called "the Divine things of the Church", D.P. 215, and "the Divine things which are called the spiritual things of the Church", T.C.R. 480. For his highest perfection or his seventh state does not rise above the state of confirmed external truth and obedience thereto (cf. A.C. 8976).

The essential things of the Church will come into light in the measure in which it is realized that they lie in the cognition and acknowledgment of the Word itself of the New Church, in the genuine Doctrine out of that Word,

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and in a life according to that Doctrine. But in exactly the same measure in which these things will arise, the proprium of man, and of the Church as a whole, will rise up in ever more intense rebellion against them.

We read in CORONIS, n. 8 : "In the Church those who live according to order are trees of life". Out of this word it is clearly evident that in so much as man lives according to order, there will be fruits with him, and indeed good fruits; but that in so much as he lives against order, everything he produces will be of no value. "By their fruits ye shall know them", Matth. VII : 16-20.

What is the soil? What is the seed? What is the tree? What are the leaves? What are the blossoms? And what are the fruits with the new seed? All these things in man must become rationally conscious reality and life. In these things all living members of the Church in willing and in thinking must find a mutual conjunction. For these things are the essential things, that is, the Divine things of the Church. Not only has the Church so far been in complete ignorance of these things, and in the thickest darkness with regard thereto, the Divine origin and the Divine essence of these things is even denied by most. And yet we read in the Word: "Everything of the Church is from the Lord, and indeed from the Divine Human of Himself", A.E. 96. As long as these things are lacking the New Church is the New Church only in name, but not in essence and reality.

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THE CHURCH AS OUR SPIRITUAL MOTHER

By THE REV. HENDRIK W. BOEF.

"By mother in the internal sense is understood the Church", A.C. 8904.

Genuine Doctrine, drawn from the Word by one who is in illustration from the Lord, teaches of what quality the Lord wills that Heaven and the Church should be. "In the literal sense of the Word of the Lord scarcely anything appears except a disordered something; but when it is read by man (ab homine), especially by an infant boy or girl, it becomes by degrees, as it ascends, more beautiful and delightful; and at last it is presented before the Lord as

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the image of a man in which and by which Heaven in its complex is represented, not as it is, but as the Lord wills that it should be, namely, that it be a similitude of Him­self", A.C. 1871. When the Word is read in a state of love and faith corresponding to the tractable and teachable state of an infant boy or girl, that is, in the consciousness of being utterly dependent for all spiritual life upon the Lord as the Father thereof, and upon the Church as the Mother through which that life comes into existence; then first is the Word read from a new affection of good which is genuinely innocent, and from a new affection of truth that is genuinely docile. It is by virtue of these affections of good and truth that man, as if of himself, perceives that love which lifts him up out of himself into the Lord, and comes into that understanding that is elevated into the very glory of the internal sense of His Word. The external sense taken into the mind from without, and made alive by the Lord from within, becomes, by degrees, as it ascends, or in the measure that truth is conjoined to good, more delightful and beautiful; for then the image and likeness of the Infinite and Eternal, which makes it such, stands out visibly in that which makes Heaven with man. Thus man is granted a vision of Heaven not as he in his unregenerated state imagined it to be, but "as the Lord wills that it should be, namely, that it should be a similitude of Himself".

This teaching from the Word of the Lord's Second Coming (A.C. 1871), gives us a realization of how important it is that we should read the Lord's Latin Word, and above all, how exceedingly important it is that we should read it in that state of heart and mind which is involved in the Lord's words: "Amen·, I say unto you, if you do not change and become as children, you shall by no means enter into the kingdom of the heavens", Matth. XVIII: 3.

All who read the Books which are the Second Advent of the Lord, are called to the Lord's New Church and to His New Heaven. The reading involves such an invitation because, while man is reading, the Lord can enlighten the mind and touch the heart. The Book in the Sanctuary or on the shelf, without the reading thereof, is like the sun at night-time; it is there, but it gives no light, for we are turned away from it.

Such is the case in regard to the Word as long as man

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remains in his own proprium. He is unwilling to deny himself, to take up his cross that he may die upon it as to his own self, and be resurrected into new spiritual life by the Lord. Being turned away from Him, he is in the night of his own self-intelligence, and in the wilderness of his self-made idea of heaven - that imaginary paradise, wherein one sees, in the fantastic light of self-delusion, the fulfilment and satisfaction of the desires of the loves of the proprium. Yea., indeed, so long as we remain in our own proprium, we are creating out of our own selves, by means of the letter of the Word, an imaginary so-called New Church, and imaginary New Heavens. These are the exact opposites of the truly New Church and truly New Heavens, as the Lord wills them to be.

It is a provision of the Divine Mercy of the Lord that it is written in His Word: "Thy kingdom come", that in uttering this sacred prayer a new vessel may be created in our minds that can be filled with a love from the Lord for that Kingdom. It is likewise a provision of His Divine Mercy that we are asked to pray: "That the Lord may be continually with us, that He may lift up and turn His faces to us, that He may teach, enlighten, and lead us, because out of ourselves we can do nothing of good; and that He may grant that we may live, lest the devil lead us astray, and instill evils into our hearts; knowing that if we are not led by Him, the devil leads us, and inspires evils of every kind, hatred, revenge, cunning, and deceit, even as a serpent infuses poison; for he is ever near, exciting and continually accusing, and where he encounters a heart turned away from God, he enters in, and dwells there, and draws the soul to hell. Free us, O Lord". The APOCALYPSE EXPLAINED, n. 1148, where this prayer is given in the form of a recommendation, significantly continues: "These things coincide with those which have been mentioned above" - and which we should read in order to understand the import of this prayer: "For hell is the devil: thus in any case it is acknowledged that man is either led from the Lord, or that he is led from hell, thus that he is in the middle".

Man, being in the middle between the Lord, and thence heaven, and hell, thus being neither the Lord nor hell, must receive from the Lord the as if of himself that wills, loves,

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and understands and thinks good and truth; just as from hell he comes into the as if of himself that wills, loves, and understands and thinks evil and falsity.

To obtain a conception of life that is truly and genuinely heavenly is therefore not possible, unless man acknowledges that out of his own very self he knows nothing at all concerning Heaven or the true Church, and that he therefore must go to the Lord to be taught from Him through His Word. The wisdom then given him from the Lord, and enjoyed by man, as if of himself, is the genuine Doctrine of the Church. To actually lead a truly and genuinely heavenly life, is not possible except from the gift of such life by the Lord. The presence and reception of the Holy Spirit is that alone which gives man the light to know the way, and the power to walk therein, both seen and perceived by man as if of himself; not from himself for neither is innate in him. "Heaven is not granted to others than those who know the way to it and who walk in that way .... No one becomes an Angel ... unless he carries with him what is angelic out of the world; and the angelic has within it the knowledge of the way out of walking in it, and a walking in the way through a knowledge of it", D.P. 60.

No man can join the Lord's New Church - His Heaven on earth. We cannot join what is angelic, that life which we are to carry out of the Church with us, if we are to come into Heaven. Man must be born from her as from his spiritual Mother, if he is to live as a son and heir in his Father's House.

Indeed, from motives which we ourselves know best, we may join this or that society bearing the name of the New Jerusalem; but if we have not been born again from her as to our internal man, we are only as adopted sons and daughters. As such, as the members of the external organization of the Church, we profit by the privileges that she extends to her own family, and by the wealth that she bestows upon it together with her name. So generous, indeed, is this gift of her maternal love, that we easily forget that we are spiritual orphans, the orphans of a forgotten God and a dead old church. But our unregenerated imagination, furnished with this unmerited and unassimilated wealth of religious knowledge, encourages us by virtue of it to assume an arrogant and boastful attitude, and

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gives us the impudent audacity to claim as rightful heirs a place in the New Heavens of the Lord's Second Coming. Our natural man, carefully educated into an enthusiastic living according to the traditions of the Church, displays this outwardly good life as evidence of heavenly piety and godliness. In our inflated love of self, we, like the Jews of old, insist upon representing the Church of the Lord, while at the same time we perpetually condemn and despise the gentiles, - the old Church.

But, as long as we are only "adopted" in the sight of the Lord and of Heaven, our spiritual parents, as long as we participate in the life of the Church out of our own propria, we neither know the true nature of the Lord, our heavenly Father, nor of the New Jerusalem, our heavenly Mother. Still less do we have a genuine love for them, but only a certain admiration, and a feeling of gratitude for the gifts bestowed upon us, and for the privileges of participation in the worship, the social and the educational life.

In this state, our love for the Lord and the Church is an idolatrous, selfish, and unregenerate one. The evil as well as the good love and appreciate that which is beneficial to them. In fact, the evil will do more to accumulate and to promote such things which, in the end, will repay them with interest commensurate with their efforts.

We all, those who come from without, as well as those who are born from parents who are members, we all are adopted at first. This state is mercifully provided that we may be furnished with the means to our reformation. But we must not remain the adopted sons and daughters of the Lord and the Church as our foster-parents, pretending all the while to be the real ones, lest when the heritage is divided, we be discovered as the children of a false god and a false church. Yea, lest our pretence of love for them be found to be what it is; and that it has nothing in common with the true love into the Lord, and with the charity toward the neighbor of the children of God, who are the children of the resurrection. (Luke XX : 36).

The children of the resurrection are those who have died as to their own proprium, and have been resurrected into new spiritual life from the Lord. "In the heavens little children and the Angels know no other father and no other mother, since they are there born anew of the Lord through

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the Church. Therefore the Lord says: 'Call no man your father on earth; for one is your Father, who is in the Heavens' (Matth. XXIII: 9)", T.C.R. 306. Their acknowledgment and love of the Lord, and of the Church, are the appearance of the image and likeness of the Lord in them. "Heaven is not Heaven out of the Angels, but out of the Lord; for love and wisdom in which the Angels are, and which make Heaven, are not out of them, but out of the Lord, yea, are the Lord in them. And because love and wisdom are the Lord's, and are the Lord there, and love and wisdom make their life, it is also evident that their life is the Lord's, yea is the Lord. That they live from the Lord, the Angels themselves confess", D.P. 28. This the Ancients also knew, whence we read: "The things of the mind, which are goods and truths, were by the Ancients called houses, the good reigning therein father, and the truth conjoined to this good mother, and the derivations sons, daughters, sons-in-law, daughters-in-law", A.C. 6690.

It was not only in a general sense that the Ancients loved the Lord and the Church, that is, as the Lord and the Church were represented outside of themselves before their eyes; but in a most particular sense they venerated the good and truth with them as the spiritual parents of their heavenly life. How wonderfully exquisite should this perception be in the New Church, in this day of the Lord's Second Coming, when the Lord can be present most intimately with the regenerating by virtue of the fulness of His Holy Spirit. The conscious perception of the presence of the Holy Spirit is the love of the affection of good, and the wisdom of the affection of truth. It is a holy state. It has nothing whatever in common with the sentimental emotionalism of an unregenerated heart. It is diametrically opposed to the hallucinations of a mind steeped in the conceit of self-intelligence. The conscious perception in heart and mind of the Divinum a Se - the Divine from Himself - is according to the degree of regeneration, the natural, spiritual, or celestial life, enjoyed and practiced by the new proprium as if of itself. Therefore we read: "Concerning the fourth commandment of the decalogue, that parents are to be honored. This commandment was given also, because honor to parents represented and thus signified love into the Lord and love towards the Church; for father

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in the heavenly sense, or the heavenly Father, is the Lord; and mother in the heavenly sense, or the heavenly Mother, is the Church; honor signifies the good of love; and the prolongation of days, which they will have, signifies the felicity of eternal life. Thus is this commandment understood in Heaven, where no other father than the Lord is known, nor any other mother than ... the Church. The Lord indeed out of Himself gives life, and through the Church gives nourishment. ... Out of these things it is now evident that the third and fourth commandments involve arcana concerning the Lord, namely, the acknowledgment and the confession of His Divine, and the worship of Him out of the good of love", A.E. 966.

It is by virtue of the creating and regenerating presence of the Holy Spirit with man, that the Church - the mother of our new proprium - becomes also the mother of that heavenly life which makes man a natural, spiritual, or celestial human being on earth; and in the spiritual world, an Angel of the natural, spiritual, or celestial Heaven. For: "Mother is the Church as to truth, thus also the truth of the Church", A.C. 9226. And in A.C. 3583: "Mother, is the affection of spiritual truth, and thence the Church; because the Church is, and is so called, out of truth and the affection thereof". The Church is truly our spiritual mother in so far as she actually is betrothed and married to the Lord, the Bridegroom and Husband. In so far as she, as the Bride and Wife, stands before Him, and is conjoined to Him by love truly conjugial in the highest sense, it is that: "By wife is meant the Church, and in the universal sense the kingdom of the Lord in the Heavens and on earth; and from this it follows that the same is meant by mother", A.C. 289. "By father in the Word is signified interior good, and by mother, truth conjoined with this good", A.C. 9199; also H.H. 382a, and A.C. 5581, where it is added: "Because the Church is a spiritual conjugium, which is from good as from a father, and from truth as from a mother". Thence: "The sons born out of that mother are truths, and are called sons of the kingdom (Matth. XIII: 38)", A.C. 8900. These sons of the kingdom would remain mere abstractions, until they become obvious in man's thought and speech. Here let us note: "That the Lord's Church is with those who are in

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charity in act or in good works, and not with those who are in faith separated from these", A.E. 82l.

Lest we remain in faith alone, we are taught in the Lord's Word as follows: "The man who is being regenerated and is being made spiritual, is first led to good through truth; for man does not know what spiritual good, or what is the same thing, Christian good is, except through truth or through the doctrinal which is out of the Word. Thus he is initiated into good. Afterward, when he has been initiated, he no longer is led to good through truth, but through good to truth, for he then not only sees out of good the truths he knew before, but also out of good brings forth new ones, which he did not know, and could not know before; for good has with itself that which desires truths, because with these it is, as it were, nourished, for it is perfected by them. These truths, new truths, differ greatly from the truths he had previously known; for those which he then knew had little life, while those which he thereafter accepts have life out of good. When man comes into good through truth, he is Israel; and the truth which he then receives out of good, that is, through good from the Lord, is new truth, which is represented by Benjamin while he was with his father. Through this truth, good fructifies in the natural, and produces truths wherein is good; they are innumerable. Thus the natural is regenerated, and through fruitfulness first becomes like a tree with good fruits, and successively like a garden. Out of these things it is evident what is meant by new truth out of spiritual good", A.C. 5804. "The truth which Benjamin represents when with his father, and is called new truth, is that which alone makes man to be a Church; for in this truth, or in these truths, there is life from good, that is, the man who is in truths of faith out of good, he is a Church; but not the man who is in truths of faith and not in the good of charity. For the truths with him are dead, even though they should be the same truths. Thence it may be seen what is meant by that this truth only is of the Church", A.C. 5806.

A Church, an Ecclesia in Latin, or έxxλησία in the Greek language, is a congregation of those who have been called out of their houses and from their individual pursuits by a crier, and who have been assembled together for the

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worship of God, and for the determination of the uses which are to be performed for the common good, from charity toward the neighbor. By correspondence, a church is a true Church only in so far as those who belong to it have been called out of their propria (by the criers, the priesthood), and having entered into the life of the new proprium, which is given anew continually out of the Holy Spirit, manifest that new life in love into the Lord, charity toward the neighbor, and in short, in all the uses of life, and in the genuine Doctrine of the Church.

"Whatever is born draws its being from the father, and its existence from the mother; it must have both that it may become something", A.C. 3299. How imperative is it then that we should go to the Lord that we may have life eternal, and how indispensable indeed is the true Church to our reformation and regeneration. What a tremendous influence toward this end can a true Church exert; and what a hindrance to our spiritual progress may the church become, when she degenerates into a purely human institution. "That which proceeds from anything derives its essence from that from which it proceeds; but it is clothed with such things as serve for communication, thus for use in a lower sphere. The things with which it is clothed are taken from such as are in the lower sphere, to the end that the internal from which it proceeds may act in the lower sphere by such means as are there", A.C. 5689. How utterly necessary the Church is to our spiritual life is evident also from A.C. 4257, where we read: "Man also perishes altogether when the Church, and that which is of the Church with him, perishes, that is, when the affection of truth, which properly is signified by mother, and which makes the Church with man, is destroyed", A.C. 4257. When this takes place, the church becomes the exact opposite of what the Lord wills that she should be. "In the internal sense father signifies the good of the Church, and in the opposite sense evil; and mother- the truth of the Church, and in the opposite sense falsity", A.C. 6306. This being the case, it behooves the member of the Church to subject himself very often to drastic self-examination. For: "When the lowest natural is affected by what is corrupt through what is hereditary from the mother, then truth cannot be conjoined to good, but can only adhere to it with

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some power; nor is truth united to good before these corruptions have been driven away", A.C. 3304.

The human proprium is so brazenly prominent in the Church, that it requires an enlightened understanding from the Lord to penetrate behind the veil of human dogma and sterile intellectualism that passes for heavenly wisdom, but does not lead to the good of life. And it takes a will infilled with true angelic love from the Lord, to rise above self-­centered sectarianism, and that sanctimonious good life of the natural man, who does not commit evils openly, indeed, but neither does go out of his way to help his neighbor, or to do good to him for his sake, except when asked or forced to do so, or when duly remunerated therefore.

The man of the Church should exert the greatest degree of vigilance lest he accept, as evidence of the good and truth of the Church, that which has been conceived by the human proprium out of evil as a father, and has been brought forth by false human reasoning as a mother. We should especially be on guard against the poisonous thought that there is such a thing as human good and truth. He who holds this, is paralyzed as to the spiritual life of his internal man, as the life of the body is paralyzed by the sting of the scorpion; for his internal man remains spiritually dead, even though the external man is glossed over by an appearance of so-called human love and intelligence, which gives man the power to seem like a regenerating human being before the eyes of the members of the Church. But as long as man remains in this state of spiritual paralysis, he either accounts it as unnecessary to worship God, or he persists in the idolatrous worship of the Lord and His Word. This worship is the adoration of the Person of the Lord without the reception of the Divine, proceeding, and it is the hallowing of the Letter of the Word without the understanding of the internal sense. This religiosity out of the unregenerated proprium turns man away from the Lord as the Father of all heavenly life, and thus from the creating, reforming, and regenerating influx of His Holy Spirit. Moreover, it holds man in aversion to the internal sense of the Word understood in the Church, thus from the Church as the Mother of all heavenly wisdom. In consequence of this, the genuine Doctrine of the Church is not extant, and man is not nourished spiritually out of the Word.

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In this state, man is unwilling to acknowledge that all good and all truth are Divine, and always remain Divine. Instead he believes that what is Divine can become so finited with man, that it can be produced by man as human love and wisdom, or good and truth in act and speech. But lest man should believe that good, in which he is held by the Lord, can be of his proprium, it is said in DIVINE PROVIDENCE, n. 79: "Let it be known, therefore, that those goods are not otherwise appropriated to man, than that they are constantly the Lord's with man; and that insofar as man acknowledges this, so far the Lord grants that good should appear to the man as his". The Divine of the Lord with man can never be transformed in such a way as to become a product of the life of a regenerating man; man exercising that life from himself, and the Lord ordering the produce of his good and truth into an angelic pattern; but: "With the regenerating man is a new will, and a new understanding; that new will and the new understanding is his conscience, that is in his conscience, through which the Lord operates the good of charity and the truth of faith", A.C. 977. And: "Interiorly in charity is the end of doing good; that this is the Divine itself with man, as it is with regenerated men, is signified [in Matth. V : 44, 45] by ‘that you may be sons of your Father in the heavens'; 'Father in the heavens' is the Divine, proceeding, for all who receive it are said to be sons of the Father, that is, of the Lord. By the sun which He makes to rise upon the evil and the good, is signified Divine Good inflowing; and by the rain which He sends upon the just and the unjust, is signified Divine Truth inflowing; for the Divine, proceeding, which is the Father in the heavens, equally inflows with the evil and the good, but the reception of it is from man; although not in this wise from man as from man, but as if from him; for the faculty of receiving continually is given him, and it also inflows, in so far as man removes the evils standing in the way, also out of the faculty which is given continually; and the faculty itself appears as if the man's, although it is the Lord's", A.E. 644. Unless the Lord is the All in all of the Church, unless He, being the Alpha, becomes the Omega also, or the First and the Last, the church is not guided by the Holy Spirit. No new truths out of good from the Lord are seen, even though the Word is studied: and what is worse, the church

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then is not in the perception of new goods, and, therefore, it cannot be in the exercise of new acts of charity. The members in such a case remain in the static observances of tradition and usage, which are held up as the example of good works. Because the man of the church, in this state, refuses to enter into the internal sense of the Word, given to the Church, he cannot be led by the Spirit of Truth, and the church becomes man-made, and not as the Lord wills that she should be.

In order that we may be lifted up out of this state, the Lord does not ask us, but He commands us, to honor our Father and our Mother. "Honor thy father and thy mother signifies love for good and truth; in the supreme sense for the Lord and for His kingdom", A.C. 8896. "In the spiritual sense to honor Father and Mother is to venerate and love God and the Church. In this sense by Father is understood God, who is the Father of all; and by Mother the Church ... ; for as a mother on earth nourishes her children with natural food, so does the Church nourish her children with spiritual food", T.C.R. 306. "In the celestial sense Father means our Lord Jesus Christ, and Mother the Communion of Saints, by which is understood His Church spread throughout the whole world .... That by the New Jerusalem is to be understood the New Church which today is to be established from the Lord, may be seen in the APOCALYPSE REVEALED, n. 880, 881; this Church and not the preceding is the Wife and Mother in this sense. The spiritual offspring which are born out of this Conjugium are the goods of charity and the truths of faith; and they who are in these from the Lord are called sons of the Wedding, sons of God, and born from Him", T.C.R. 307. These and no others are the Communion of Saints - the sanctified ones by the Lord's Holy Spirit. They are the Lord's New Jerusalem, as He wills that it should be, because with them the New Church is being established every day anew from the Lord. "It is to be kept in mind that from the Lord continually proceeds a Divine Sphere of celestial love toward all who embrace the Doctrine of His Church, and who, like infants in the world their father and mother, obey Him and apply themselves to Him, and will to be nourished, that is, to be instructed by Him", T.C.R. 308. - Even so, come, Lord Jesus. AMEN.

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FAITH AND TO BELIEVE

BY ANTON ZELLING.

I

"The innocence that dwells in wisdom is to know, to acknow­ledge, and to believe that one can understand nothing and will nothing from one's self, and hence that one does not wish to understand and to will anything from one's self, but only from the Lord; and also that whatever one supposes one understands from one's self is false; and that whatever one supposes one wills from one's self is evil. This state of life is the state of innocence of the posterior state, in which are all who are in the third Heaven, which is called the Heaven of innocence. Hence it is that those are in wisdom, because what they understand and what they will is from the Lord. But it is of the innocence that dwells in ignorance, such as it is with infants and boys, to believe that all things they know and think, and also all they will, are in themselves; and that all things they thence speak and do are from themselves. That these are fallacies they do not comprehend. The true things which are of that innocence are for the most part founded upon the fallacies of the external senses, which however must be shaken off as man advances to wisdom. Out of these few things it can be established that the good of innocence of the posterior state must not be conjoined with the truth of innocence of the prior state" .

ARCANA CELESTIA 9301.     

In Dutch geloof [faith] is a noun derived from the verb gelooven [to believe]. However self-evident this may sound, still in this identification a distinction is lost which is of the very greatest importance for life. The Latin for geloof [faith] is fides, and for gelooven [to believe] credere, two different words (compare also the French foi and croire, the English faith and to believe). If we translate into Dutch this statement from the DOCTRINE OF THE NEW JERUSALEM CONCERNING FAITH, n. 7: Ubi veritas non ereditur, ibi fides dicitur with "Where truth is not geloofd [believed], there it is said geloof [faith]", this at first sounds as singular as if one said: "Where truth is not loved, there it is said love". Similarly the Word in the Latin has the often occurring expression fidem habere et credere which in the Dutch language in "geloof hebben en gelooven" [to have faith and to believe] is reduced into a synonym.

The Word says in every line that Faith, fides, is the

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Truth in its coherence, that it is the Lord with man, the Amen. But it is not the Lord with man, unless the man believes. Therefore to believe [gelooven], credere, is the word of words in the Church, for A.C. 9222 states: "The first thing of all with the man of the Church is to believe the Word (credere Verbum), and this primary thing is with him who is in the truth of faith and the good of charity". Now what does the Word say of to believe? Four statements may here follow which will afterwards be summed up in one thesis:

I. "The spiritual life is acquired first by knowing the true things (then they are as it were at the door), then by acknowledging them (then they are in the entrance hall), and finally by believing them (then they are in the inner chamber)", A.C. 8772.

II. "To ascribe to the Lord is to know, to acknowledge, and to believe that the good and true things of faith are from the Lord", A.C. 9223.

III. "The memory and the understanding are like entrance halls, and the will is like a chamber", A.C. 9230.

IV. "Those who are of one opinion and feeling appear together in one house, and still more if in one chamber of the house". "But if they stand outside, the things thought are indeed perceived, but as from another and not from one's self", R.V. 9213.

Conclusion:

To know is at the door, to acknowledge in the entrance hall, to believe in the inner chamber.

To know is in the memory, to acknowledge in the understanding, to believe in the will.

To know stands outside, to acknowledge brings together into one house, to believe together into one inner room.

From all this it appears that to believe is the inmost degree; and according to A.C. 8772 that it is said to believe only then when the good inflowing from the Lord into the interior man there conjoins itself with the true things, and that good has drawn those things to itself.

On almost every page of the Word the verb to believe occurs in the opposite senses:

5. To believe from internal perception that it is so;

2. A believing out of persuasion from some other source, A.C. 8928.

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With great fear we therefore arrive at the realization that for the first time with the Doctrine of the Church the word to believe begins to open like a flower of which the internal things are complete paradises.

For now, contrast fidem habere with credere. Fidem habere is to have faith, with the accent on to have, thus the possessive, the intellectual. In credere, to believe, however, there is the word dare, to give (thence to give faith), thus the indebted, the voluntary. Credere, to believe, is to lend a willing ear and therewith the whole heart, the whole understanding, the whole soul, a lending without usury; to believe is a complete giving one's self, giving one's life for a friend, losing one's life. "Reception is nothing if there is not also application", A.C. 8439 teaches. Reception is to have, application is to lend one's self. Stated as a paradox we may have faith and nevertheless not believe, standing at the door and in the court, and never entering into the inner room. A curious representation for us Hollanders in particular, may be seen in the old Dutch doors halved across their width, which lead to "neighbours' gossip over the lower door", half inside half outside, not open not closed, half street half court, neither street nor house. The religious life of many does not go farther than the upper part of the body over the closed lower door, against which kicks a clumsy foot. How far is this removed from the father beseeching with tears: "Lord, I believe; help Thou mine unbelief", MARK IX : 24. To our faith (fides), which for all of us together in one House should be the Lord, we contribute so very little believing (credere), for else so much in our lives would not be so ugly, so raw, so blunt, so common. Our intellectual, raised in a certain light, may get as far as an appearance of fidem habere, having faith, but in respect of credere, to believe, our voluntary leaves the infernal sluices of superstition and unbelief wide open. Pure Faith dwells only in a pure believing, and the reverse. "You in Me and I in you". For believing is the Lord with man, and faith is the Lord's with man, for it is said that the Lord dwells with man only in what is His. Believing is embraced and kissed only with faith; and to believe is to give to the Lord the first of all firstlings of faith. "Those only who are in the stream of Providence know and believe that the Divine Providence of the Lord is in

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the most singular things", A.C. 8478. Note: they know and believe, that is, from the door into the inner chamber of the mind. He in whom the word believe begins to sound, vibrates even to the inmost impulses thereof, and experiences with tears how impure he is and how much he is in need of the Lord's infinite Mercy. A medical pun says: "Operation successful; the cured patient succumbed". Reformation and regeneration is an operation of which a man dies cured, so much so that afterwards he is surprised to see how others with great ado of mourning bury his corpse of recollections. To believe is to rise again, cured of all superstition and unbelief. To believe is from a stinking ditch to enter into the crystal clear stream of Providence. We learn from A.C. 8443 that only in enlightenment, and even then only at times, man is receptive of the Divine Truth in the lowest Heaven, "and when it falls into the ideas it makes the faculty of perceiving, and also of believing that it is so". It is there said the faculty of believing, and let us contrast that with what we commonly understand by "believing": to think, to hold, to mean, to deem, to accept upon authority, to surmise, to take for, to suppose, to imagine, to guess, to suspect, to make believe, and what not. No, to believe is, a faculty from the Lord, which as "the very first with the man of the Church" we must pray for with all our life, in order that the Word may shine through the whole of this life into the farthermost corners, "having no part dark" LUKE XI: 36.

Let it be said to us that there must be an equal ratio between believing (credere) and faith (fides), not the least more or less; that there is the danger of an appearance of having great faith (fides) and along with that to believe (credere) nothing except with a mixture of superstition and unbelief. For the first time since creation the word to believe opens out into its sense in which it fills and conjoins all Heavens; to believe is to glorify in and by life, by the entire every-day life. Only in a true believing does the Doctrine of the Church come to life; without believing there is neither Faith, nor Doctrine, nor Church. Let us not call down an angelic judgment upon ourselves: "You say you have faith but never in your life have you believed". Credere in Deum says the Word, that is: "to

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believe into God", and that is a standing open unto the Lord of the new will and the new understanding, which, even into every fibre, makes us new, that is, the Lord’s.

In essence to believe, credere, and faith, fides, make one such as love and wisdom; for to believe is of love, and faith is of wisdom. So when we read in D.L.W. n 139: "There is indeed love without wisdom, but that love is man's and not the Lord's; and also there is wisdom without love, but that wisdom indeed is from the Lord, but it has not the Lord in it" - we are fully justified in reading this statement also in this way: "There is indeed a believing without faith, but that believing is man's and not the Lord's; and also there is a faith without believing, but that faith indeed is from the Lord, but it has not the Lord in it". So read, the axe is even nearer unto the root. The statement should be accepted that there may exist a faith from the Lord but without the Lord in it. How evident it is from this that the word to believe is pronounced much too lightly; for the knowing of several true things of faith does not yet by a long way justify "to believe" being spoken of. All unregenerated provinces of man's mind are provinces of incarnate unbelief and superstition; and where these provinces claim a voice in the Faith of the Church, with chief seats and greetings, there offences arise. The hour has come in which Doctrine, that is, the Lord as to the Doctrine of the Church, puts an end to these offences. For the statement should be accepted: there is indeed faith alone, but no doctrine-alone; doctrine from the Lord but without the Lord therein cannot be the Heavenly Doctrine, for the simple reason that the Doctrine of the Church is Faith out of Believing, a twoness of Existere out of Esse. The Doctrine of the Church is to believe the Word, credere Verbum, in active fulness, glory, and might; it is not only the intelligence of the true, but also the wisdom of the good; it is not only the enlightened understanding of the Word, but also a directly proportional revelation which regards life, A.C. 9248. The Doctrine of the Church therefore shows the door to all faith from the Lord but without the Lord therein; for such a faith is not compatible with believing the Word.

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DE HEMELSCHE LEER

EXTRACT FROM THE ISSUE FOR APRIL-MAY 1936

FAITH AND TO BELIEVE

BY ANTON ZELLING.

II

"What the Angels think they believe", A. C. 9303.

He who ponders on the word to believe - not taking the word into the mouth, but entering into it - therein perceives a Heaven, the Heaven of Innocence. What is the very first with the man of the Church, that also in his language is the very first; and in the Dutch language the word to believe is a Paradise in itself for wise recreation. Let a man of the Church take into his hand a dictionary of Middle-Dutch and turn to the word gelooven [to believe], and he will, ever more overwhelmed, advance from one surprise to the other. Just listen:

in geloven ontfaen  : to have a property put in one's name, in order to possess it for another.

in geloven sijn         : stand in the name of another. .

bi geloven                : upon my word.

gelove                       : deadly fatigued, exhausted.

gekive lien                : to acknowledge one's self to be conquered, to submit one's self, to acknowledge one's self vanquished.

gelove maken          : to compel to submission.

geloven                     : to believe it to be the truth, to credit, to lend, to stand bail for.

gelooftocht               : bail.

gelovebrief               : letter of instructions.

gelover                      : one who is bail.

gelovigen                  : to make true.

gelof                          : obligation, promise of payment; honour, praise.

geloffast                     : obliged by promise.

gelofnisse                  : obligation, bond.

geloofde                     : obligation contracted by law.

geloofsamheit           : confidence, credit.

geloofte                      : obligation voluntarily taken upon one's self.

gelovelijc                   : attested.

gelovelijke                : in good faith.

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Understood out of the Word almost every signification involves a complete doctrine. Consider an expression as gelove lien (lien is to confess) to acknowledge one's self vanquished; does not the word gelove taken as fatigued and exhausted, here say that with the man in whose combats of temptations the Lord conquered, the evil and false is reduced and subjugated, after which then the mind, humiliated to the dust and acknowledging itself vanquished is erected by the Lord in order to stand in the name of the Lord [in ge/oven te sijn]; and to receive in his own name [in geloven te ontfaen] the good of the Lord or the celestial proprium in order to possess it for the Lord as His heir? Here we may think of the Lord's sad question:

"How can ye believe, which receive honour one of another, and seek not the honour that is of God only?" JOHN V : 44. There is no question here of in geloven ontfaen [of possessing a property for another], but of gelof stelen [stealing honour]. In the word gelooven we cannot sufficiently listen also to those old forms, they sparkle through that word with shades of light of action and reaction: they fill it with a heavenly choir, an angelic choir full of glorification, gratitude, praise, and confidence, with a song of a bond and a voluntary obligation, of a completely acknowledging one's self vanquished and of an entirely lending one's self. The word gelooven, so heard through and through, becomes a Song of Songs, and the affection thereof is this: to believe the Word (credere Verbum) is to make true [gelovigen] the Word in and by life; to believe is to acknowledge all the possessive to be endebted, to the Lord all the good and true, to the hell all the evil and false, by which the good and the true are appropriated to man, and the evil and the false are disowned.

While we scrupulously continue our way through the garden of doctrinal etymology, the wonders gradually increase. The Latin word for faith, fides, rests on two sanskrit roots, namely band, bond, bundle (thus the truth in its coherence), as well as to expect, to await to confide; just as in the Hebrew where amunah is one word both for truth and faith. The sanskrit root of the Latin word for to believe, credere, means to give confidence. In the Greek both words are connected with terms from financial business, thus indicating the truth of good, for the truth is the

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quality, and thus at the same time also the silver value of good. The root of fides is related to a Greek verb meaning to save up, (again the truth in its being gathered together), and the root of credere is related to a Greek root meaning to mix (indeed in believing the whole life is mixed and concerned with the truth known and acknowledged). In fidem habere, to have faith, there is, even in the very language, a sense of wages, of having wages, even with the judging by-thought of having forfeited one's wages; while in credere, to believe, even in the very language there is a sense of lending, of giving one's self while lending. In believing there are two reciprocities of love:

I. between tbe Lord and man; II. between men mutually. This appears clearly in the English word to believe, for the ancient Teuton root galaub means dear, lovely; Gothic liuban, to cherish as what is dear, to love; in early Middle English the word was spelled beleven, which coincides with the Dutch word beleven, meaning the bringing into actual life of a spiritual experience, thus with life and with love. The text is of Faith, the experiences are of Believing. Originally therefore to believe meant to hold something as dear, high, and of value, or, as the Word says: to have holy and to hold holy. If anywhere, then here the language on all sides fully confirms the statement of the Word that to believe is the very first with the man of the Church, for language after language as in rivalry sums up the virtues of this word, so that with a thousand sparkles it begins to glitter before our eyes as the most precious of all jewels, or to shine as that one exceptional pearl with which the Lord compared the Kingdom of Heavens.

__________

He who ponders on the Word to believe therein perceives the Heaven of Innocence. It is known from the Word: "that with man the pure True never can be given, both because from the evil in which he is and which has its seat in him, the false continually flows forth, and because the true things among each other have a nexus, and therefore if one is false, and the more if several, the remaining true things themselves are thence defiled, and draw something from the false. But the True is said to be purified from the false when man can be kept from the Lord in the

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good of innocence; innocence is to acknowledge that with him there is nothing but evil, and that all good is from the Lord; then to believe that from himself he does not know nor perceive anything, but out of the Lord, thus also the true which is of faith (fidei)" A.C. 7902. Thus believing can only be spoken of when man from the Lord can be kept in the good of innocence. The faculty of believing is thus purely the Lord's, and only out of that believing do the truths which man previously knew, acknowledged, and perceived, became pure truths.

To know, to acknowledge, and to believe are in the same relation as the three Heavens; to believe is of the inmost, highest, or third Heaven, of the Heaven of Innocence. To know, to acknowledge, and to believe are related as effects, causes, and ends, as the three discrete degrees. In that sequence they are mentioned in the Word over and over again, and thereby is indicated the fulness of each state of life of man. Each state of life of man is complete and then capable of being raised, when in that state acknowledging is inherent in his knowledge, and believing in his acknowledging. The end of all knowing and acknowledging is to believe; and if this end is obtained then the analytical way; through experience to the causes and afterwards through the causes to the true principles, is changed into the synthetic way, this being the angelic way (see Preface to RATIONAL PSYCHOLOGY). As soon as man has arrived at believing the fountain of the pure True begins to spring into eternal life; therefore the Lord says: "He that believeth on Me, as the Scripture hath said, out of his belly shall flow rivers of living water", JOHN VII : 38. Faith is not the sole means of grace, but to believe Faith, in Dutch het Geloof gelooven; and that this is not a pleonasm, from all the preceding, can be clearly seen.

Everywhere where the Lord speaks of believing, as in the previous quotations "How can ye believe ... " and "He that believeth on Me ... " there the Lord is the Lord in respect to Faith. And spoken out of Faith, to love is to believe. If we see through a red glass, all colours become shades of red, and if we see through a yellow glass all

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colours become shades of yellow. Seen out of the true all the good is the good of the true, seen out of the good all the true is the true of the good. If we compare T.C.R. n. 344 con­cerning FAITH with A.C. nrs. 8033 to 8035 concerning THE DOCTRINE OF CHARITY, it will strike us that in the number referred to concerning Faith charity is not even mentioned, while in the numbers concerning the Doctrine of Charity faith is not called Truth but "internal affection which consists therein that one wills out of the heart to know what is the true and what is the good, and this not for the sake of doctrine as an end, but for the sake of life". In the one passage there is no direct mention of what is said in the other passage; internally one by correspondence, in the letter they appear antipodal; the statement concerning faith makes charity to be of faith; the statement concerning charity makes faith to be of charity. With reference to the word to believe we here find ourselves placed before a remarkable broadening of the definition which gives a synthesis of the two chapters: to believe is to will to be internally affected by the truth and good known and acknowledged, for the sake of life. It is in believing that love and faith dwell together as in their use; for it is known from the Word that faith without love is science and that faith is not called faith except out of charity. For this reason love and faith in a lovely rivalry ascribe the believing the the to the other, and in the Word we now see the believing said to be entirely of love and then again entirely of faith.

As soon as the word to believe begins to live in us, it begins in every statement to light a veil through. Take this statement from the posthumous work ON THE LAST JUDGMENT in the chapter Concerning Faith Alone: "Cognitions of truth do not become cognitions of faith until man has done them", Posfh. Theol. Works I: 453, n. 199; we now at once therein read also the following: "before knowing and acknowledging have believing in them". If we read in D.L.W. 237: "The celestial degree is opened by the celestial love of uses, which love is the love into the Lord; and the love into the Lord is nothing else than to dedicate the precepts of the Word to the life" - there again presents itself a new, still more sublime definition of believing: to dedicate, to give over to, to cede to, to

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confide to life the precepts of the Word; the Latin has mandare vitae, literally: to give into the hands of the life, which in a few words epitomizes the entire etymology of the word credere, to believe. And here it again openly appears: the celestial love of uses, being love into the Lord, is nothing else than believing, To believe is to be in the celestial love; and if of celestial love it is said: "What would there not be in celestial love if man would be in it", this question epitomizes all the many things which the Lord in His Coming on earth said about believing. How often did not the Lord save a man, saying: "Thy faith has made thee whole", from which words the faith-aloners concluded and conclude that faith is the sole saving means. But now if we examine their idea on this matter, that idea of their thinking appears to be "nothing else than the idea of the sole word and not the idea of anything", as the Word repeatedly expresses itself. The idea of their thinking is faith as science, as dogma, theory, hypothesis, axiom, device, knock-down argument, and has no believing inherent in it. Only believing makes faith to be faith and it is with repetitions a thousandfold seen from a thousand sides and in a thousand ways that we would wish to glorify this word to believe, for its signification can gradually be neglected - the fall of all former churches. The Believing must make great the Faith of the Church. As Mary said: "My soul doth magnify the Lord", LUKE I : 46, so also it applies to the Church that the believers make the body of the Lord, they in Him and He in them, CANONS, The Holy Spirit, III :6, or otherwise the believing is not the very first with the man of the Church, but a reasoning about not-understood and therefore uncertain doctrinals.

Faith, which the Most Ancients compared with the moon, shall be as the light of the sun, as prophesied by ISAIAH, XXX: 26, and with the Coming of the Lord this Scripture was fulfilled: faith was lit through by that believing for which the Lord on earth gave the faculty anew; nothing is truly new, unless, being known and acknowledged, it is also believed, that is, obeyed, thus willed and done. What is new cannot live but in its own, new wine in new bags. From now on in the word faith we must also hear the word to believe or we have no part at

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all in the Lord's Coming, not to mention the Second Coming. The Second Coming is following the Coming, and this signifies for the Church that faith is following the believing, not the least more or less. If we began our consideration with stressing the disadvantage of the words geloof [faith] and gelooven [to believe] being of the same root in our language, now that we have advanced to the true principle, we are able to regard the subject from above or from within, and for the first time we may speak of a rare advantage. In the former state of purely introductory consideration it would have been a not-genuine truth to identify faith and believing, but now the genuine truth presents itself that faith is faith only out of believing; and let the very first with man be now and to all eternity that he know, acknowledge, and believe that the faculty of believing is from the Lord. With which then his entire life, his attitude in life and his standard in life, are totally altered.

Let us continue to regard faith and believing as distinctly undivided, and as said, with repetitions a thousandfold from a thousand sides and in a thousand ways, for the subject is worth it, being "the very first with the man of the Church".

A woman compared herself before the Lord with a dog who eats the crumbs from the table of the rich. And the Lord said: "Great is thy faith; be it unto thee according to thy word". "Dogs" are those outside of the Church and those at the circumference of the Church who understand scarcely anything, A.C. 7784. How is this word to be explained without seeing the relation of faith, fides, and to believe, credere? What can make faith, fides, great if the dog signifies the very lowest or the lowly ones of the Church, also those who are outside of the Church, furthermore those who brag much and understand little of such things as are of the Church? For the most lowly ones who understand scarcely anything and by the Lord Himself are called dog, cannot possibly have a faith, not to mention a great faith which, according to T.C.R. 344 has its exis­tence in I. spiritual sight, II. consent of truths, III. conviction, IV. acknowledgment inscribed an the mind - unless a great and pure believing, credere, provides the poten-

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cy to receive here or in the other life the all of faith, fides. It is evident that here with the word faith, "great is thy faith", the stress is on the believing.

By this we again enter into new grounds, and with great fear we begin to ask: But what is the faith of the simple, fides simplicium? Here too we have to cleanse ourselves from great stains. For, if we are honest we must confess that we often put those "simple ones" far outside and far below ourselves. In a natural idea which never is able to think apart from the person, the simple one is taken to be a silly, an undeveloped, yea a bluntwitted man, a simpleton in short. The more the faith-aloner clouds away in his quibblings, the more he despises the "simple one" as an outsider. We can now understand why. The more a man rejects the believing, credere, that is, the less a man allows himself to be kept by the Lord in the good of innocence, the more the faith of the simple, fides simplicium, removes itself from him, outside of him, whereas it should be his natural ground, basis, firmament, and container, as the letter is such, of and for the internal senses. For it is known from the Word that the Word has been written according to the faith of the simple, A.C. 7632. Let us not place the faith of the simple outside ourselves as an inferiority: the faith of the simple dwells in every natural mind that is pure and free from all stains of the love of self and love of the world, pure and free thus from unbelief and superstition, for from the love of self there exhales a sphere of unbelief and from the love of the world a sphere of superstition. Note this: unbelief and superstition are not infernal opposites of faith, fides, but of to believe, credere, hence unbelief and not unfaith. But more of this later on. We have said, the faith of the simple lives in and fills each natural mind which is pure and free from unbelief and superstition, and which therefore is full of believing. Simple in this way also obtains another, a new meaning: filled by the one thing, filled by The One. Simple [Dutch eenvoudig - of one fold] might also be understood as one of fold, one of pleat; hence immediate application of life to Doctrine, the Doctrine by one folding over becoming life. Of the Word it is not only said that it has been written "according to the faith of the simple", but also that it has been written "in correspondences". So seen the faith of the

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simple becomes the faith of the simple natural mind which is in correspondence with the spiritual mind, one therewith. And the pure natural mind does nothing else but simply believe that the very least which is contrary to Order, cruelly avenges itself. For this cruel avenging, for this Wrath of Jehovah, the faith of the simple is all in fear. This simple fear is in correspondence with the holy fear, and following it. Of this one great simple fear the "faith of the simple", so disdainfully overlooked by many, is full, yea overfull. There is an appearance as if we could leave the natural mind, swept with brooms, and feast ourselves in the spiritual mind on spiritual things. At that moment life ceases, for believing ceases; and with the believing the faith of the simple. What marvel that then the end is worse than the beginning.

If in the posthumous work THE LAST JUDGMENT, in the chapter On Faith Alone, we read "that those who are in the simple faith of the true resist evils", Posth. Theol. Works I : 450, n. 192, how then can we continue to place the faith of the simple outside ourselves as something on which to look down with contempt, almost as the world which takes it "as a bond for the populace". But that is equal to a Cain murder, to suicide. For the Church and for each man who is a Church, the faith of the simple is the basis; everything which for him shines in and from the letter, if it does not fall into simple faith, falls on stony places, by the way side, or among thorns. Everything which is received in a spirit of curiosity, of inquisitiveness, thus in a spirit of ambition, lust of dominion and gain, is indeed understood, but is not retained in the memory, it remains only for the time being, no longer than is called for by self­-interest. Therefore in and behind the word faith listen to the word to believe in its entire far-reaching and all­-embracing sense: The believing of the simple. Only if we understand it in that way, do we understand why they who are in the simple faith of the true resist evils. The love of the true for the sake of the true is a simple love, and the love of that true for the sake of life leads to simple faith or to believing. Take it as said that "they who are in the simple faith of the true", simply means "they who simply believe the true", and to believe simply in each higher degree rests on the faith of the simple, fides simplicium, as on its

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basis. Or would you proudly fancy that the faith of the simple is excluded from this word in A.C. 8172: "Who believes that in temptations the Lord alone resists, conquers"? In that case the silly ones will enter before you into the kingdom of the Heavens, silly ones [onnoozelen], well understood as to its basic sense of harmless or innocent [the root of the word onnoozel is the same as of the word innocent; the root of the English word silly is selig, which in German and in Dutch means blessed]. The simple ones, abstractedly from person, are the Divine good and true things in the lasts of the natural. Starting from the Lord everything is living, down into the letter; starting from man everything should be living, from the letter even into the Lord. To believe and nothing else makes the letter living; and if the believing, credere, does not purify the last of the natural even into the sensual, and does not therein begin and end, end and begin, up and down, down and up, as along a Jacob's ladder, the Church is not in the man, however much the man may be in the Church. It is known from the Word that the Lord continually orders the Heavens. To believe is to pray for that continuous ordering from the Lord "as in the Heavens so upon the earth".

That each Doctrine of the Church must be confirmed by the letter of the Word, thus throws up an immense truth of life: the basis of the faith of the simple may never and nowhere be departed from; there may never be the least more or less of faith, fides, than of believing, credere; all that goes beyond that, is from the evil. A doctrine which lays on loads "too heavy to bear and yourselves you do not touch them with a finger", as was the Lord's reproach, is not the Doctrine. "My load is light and My yoke is easy", this word of the Lord is incomprehensible if the simple believing is passed over in faith, for in true believing the Heaven of Innocence flows open and fills all with an overwhelming peace and joy, in which according to the measure of believing the true things of faith spring open as flowers. Come, let us acknowledge one to another in humility: so far there has been so bitterly little of joy in our faith. It is still such a sad moon, so far still from shining like the light of the sun. We allow ourselves so little to be drawn - "unless the Father draw him", says the Lord - we allow ourselves so little to be drawn in the faculty of

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believing. And faith without believing is so sad, so bleak, so chilly, so dead; a body without soul. What else signifies that oft repeated expression from the Lord: "Only believe"? Does it signify: only know, only acknowledge, only understand? The Lord gave the parable of one who wishes to build a tower, how he first sits down and counts the costs, in order that he need not stop halfway and become a ridicule to all. The tower is Doctrine; first to sit down is to examine one's self; to count the costs is to seek a ratio between truths of life having become life and truths of faith having become faith; to have to stop halfway is to believe insufficiently by which the rest becomes not faith, but science; a ridicule to all is, seen from Heaven, a monstrous construction of fantasies. So was the tower of Babel half built, so too in the Church there may arise systems of doctrine which crumble down halfway. There must be the base of the faith of the simple, to believe simply, else faith becomes a faith from the Lord without the Lord therein, thus a monster.

Simply believing leads to being "content in God [tevreden in God]". The Word in the Latin has "contentus in Deo", and how beautiful the word tevreden[ which is derived from peace] may be, we must here regard this word contentus in its literal meaning; held together, contained. And thus translated, we grasp it at once: man is not held together" in God except by only believing. A faith from the Lord, but without the Lord therein, gives only a feeling of sanctity and apparent security. The Angels are held together in God only because what they think they believe. To think the things of faith and not to believe them, that is, not to transmit them to life, does not hold together and contain. Contentus is held together in a proportionate ratio; tevreden, however beautiful it may be, allows thought and affection to slacken and to thicken to a certain self-satisfaction and self-sufficiency, while the holding together points to atmospheric pressure, to high tension. The devils feel themselves choked in Heaven, they cannot stand that pressure or that high tension, because they lack that holding together. In a true believing that being held together from the Lord and in the Lord becomes ever more powerful to such an extent that the such resist evils, for truly to believe is to believe simply. Simply believing holds the Heavens of

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internal things together as does the letter the spiritual and the celestial senses. Again: how is it that we place the faith of the simple and the simple faith outside and even below ourselves? And which is better: to believe that Jehovah punishes and damns, or only to know and to acknowledge that the matter is not quite so simple as that, and that therefore the risk is not quite so imminent?

In many places in the Word it is said that man with all the true he thinks must believe that it is from the Lord; and in A.C. 8865 that the Lord becomes ruling when man not only believes that all is from the Lord, but also loves it to be so. From this there are these things to be concluded: I. that to believe stands in between to think and to love; that to believe is the influx of the love into the thinking, thus that to believe is animated thinking; II. that there are two kinds of believing, a having to believe (hence the [Dutch] popular expression "eraan moeten gelooven" (being forced to believe), which understood from the Middle Dutch means "having to subject one's self") and a believing of free will when love rules. Reverse that first quotation so that it is read: "With all that man believes he must think that it is from the Lord", and a satanic falsity arises. In the statement in the Word the thinking is out of believing and the believing is from the Lord. In the reversal the believing is man's and the thinking a self-conceited imagination. The good thinking is believing from love. Therefore it is said,. "What the Angels think they believe". The Doctrine of the Church is purely angelic. What it thinks it believes. And the basis of its will is to believe simply, yea, yea, nay, nay.

The Word says: "They are in correspondences that are in the good of love and of faith", A.C. 8615. The good of faith is to believe, and not only to believe, but also to love it to be so. The Word further says: "Everything that happens on earth according to correspondences, is valid with power in Heaven", ibidem. It can clearly be seen from both statements that to believe opens Heaven, and thus why to believe the Word is the very first with the man of the Church.

If, therefore a stranger were to ask what is the characteristic of the New Church, the only answer would be this:

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"That now for the first time from the Lord to believe and faith are one". We have previously been allowed to see from the Word that there is believing without faith, this being man's and not the Lord's; and also faith without believing, then, indeed, from the Lord but without the Lord therein. This brings us a step closer to the comprehension of the Contrast repeatedly given in the Word of the roman-catholic and protestant churches; in the letter a contrast of churches outside of the Church, in the internal sense a contrast of attitudes of life within the Church.

The characteristic of the roman-catholic church is a believing alone, of the protestant church a faith alone. In the roman-catholic church the Word is closed and with that all truth of faith has been shut out. In the protestant church the Word is indeed opened, but every truth of faith from the Lord is falsified and thus without the Lord therein. Imagine a roman-catholic and a protestant having been present at the Lord's miraculous healings on earth, then the roman-catholic would have melted away in exaltation, but the protestant would stiffly have turned away, centered only on the end, on the old account of debt acquitted with the blood of the cross. A protestant Lourdes is just as inconceivable as a roman-catholic elder. A roman catholic is a christian heathen, without faith; a protestant a christian Jew, without believing. Both reach back over the simple faith of the Primitive Christian Church to the Jewish Church at its end, the roman-catholics to the exterior magnificence, the external compulsion by miracles, the idolatry of images and saints, who are nothing else but such as force the frontiers, sensual natural men who from ambition deceitfully claim stigmas for themselves in order to be worshipped; while the protestants reach back to the internal cruelty of the Jews, while their abominable doctrine of election is nothing but the delusion taken over from the Jews of being an "elected people" under a revengeful Jehovah. Both, the roman-catholics in their humanized believing, in their superstition without any faith, and the protestants in their inhuman faith without any believing, herein stand far below the upright piety of the old Jew who could still be found here and there, but whose tradition today is fast dying out.

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From here and there examples of the pious old Jew have come to the New Church, and they give us matter for thought. From the Word it is known that for the sake of the letter of the Old Testament the Jewish nation has been kept extant until the Coming of the New Church. Out of Divine Providence the Hebrew language was preserved even to every title and jot for the Crown of Churches. But in the pious old Jew, a type now become rare, "the Jew in whom there is no guile", something else also has been handed down, namely a witness, a reflection slowly dying away of the overwhelming power with which the Lord compelled that people externally to give a representation of a Church. Here we find ourselves placed before another distinction again: a piety which without having believing or faith nevertheless draws what it is from believing and faith. That piety of the old Jew has much of the faithfulness of a forgotten sentinel who, thousands of years after the battle had been fought, nevertheless remained at his post, simply because he was not relieved. In that obedience there is something affecting, for what of believing and faith is there inherent in that upright piety? What else can be inherent in it but something ghostly and spectre-like? For it is full of the delusive idea of the souls of the dead somewhere in the universe awaiting the day of judgment in order to be re-united to their bodies; orthodox Jews still have themselves buried with the gravestone ajar. The Messiah of their letter has not come, does not come, and will not come; they kiss the letter of their Lawscroll as thrice holy, and the internal of that letter is empty for them, and therefore filled up with masorete phantasies permitted at that time and kabbala legends since spun out. Their pious commemoration is a pious kissing of the letter as dry bones of the dead in idle expectancy that they will again be clothed with sinews, flesh, and skin. Their piety is not credere, to give or to present faith, but to put or to attach faith, an attaching themselves to the unopened truths of faith - for them crumbled into dust. So great was that Divine external compulsion by miracles that after thousands of years its after-effects' operate with undiminished force in these righteous descendants. An awe-inspiring greatness emanates from that piety, and at the same time an unspeakable

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sadness, for it is as a chrysalis in the cocoon which eternally remains chrysalis and will never become a butterfly, a mummy speaking of the past without any future, a golem with proverbs bound on him, with watchwords remembered, but not understood. Now roman-catholics and protestants in passing by the Primitive Christian faith of the simple at the same time pass by this piety in order to take up anew the falsities and the evils of the jewish nation. The one whores after other gods and loves the world, the other claims for himself the language of Canaan and loves only himself, under a Lord God who freely elects and damns. With the roman-catholics soft-hearted intellectual deterioration, a weak credulity; with the protestants a grim petrefaction of the will, a hardened faculty of believing. For this reason too, old worldlings by preference turn roman-catholic, and that church does not divide into numberless sects as the protestant church does. The imaginary saving good allows of a cohering together, but truth turned into orthodoxy divides and splits up into infinity. The roman-catholic church, as the Lord said of the Jewish church, has made the Law of no avail by its human institutions. The roman catholic fasts, confesses his evil; his supper is without wine, and his bread is a wafer imitating the unleavened without any sense; for prayer he rattles off a formula and crosses himself mechanically, he dies with extreme unction - all signs that he is chiefly after his being well off here and hereafter without the wish or the need of knowing any truth. His believing has eaten up all remnants of faith, leaving nothing but a mere superstitious believing in good omens. The protestant will have nothing to do with all this; his chief aim is not that he be well off, but that from his truth he may go out justified. For this reason he eats the bread of his supper in independent, measured cubes, cut with a knife. The roman-catholic claims admittance on the ground of believing without any faith, the protestant claims admittance on the ground of faith without any believing, for his faith consumed all believing. Therefore too the roman-catholic makes himself active about good works, and the protestant shoves them aside and essentially away as self-meritorious. The one believes in a purgatory to be purged from his last evils; the

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other in no way troubles himself about first or last evils since the sole faith sufficiently saves and justifies. The one with masses for the dead seeks to assist the souls of the departed, and to pray for what may still be remedied; for the other dead is dead and all the rest a question of election where no help can be of any avail. The one buys himself his imaginary heaven, the other claims justification without any more ado. The one overornaments his chapel and loves solemn masses in full ornateness, the other leaves his house of God bare and contents himself with austere Divine services. In short, the one appeals to his good, the other appeals to his truth, the one in appearance holy; the other in appearance secure. And with that they both close to themselves the Door which for the Church is the Lord, but for them is "I know you not", the one by soft-hearted superstition, the other by hardened unbelief.

Seen inwardly in the Church itself, we might now say that where the genuine truth is not believed, there is a roman-catholic or a protestant attitude of life, and at best a pious jewish one, Faith, fides, is the complex of genuine truths, which complex of truths and the Lord therein, may or may not be believed. Exteriorly they appear in man as if the same, the complex which is believed and in which is the Lord, and every complex not believed, thus without the Lord therein; but internally in the one there is the New Church - believing and faith for the first time perfectly one according to the end itself of Creation - and in every other, either the jewish, or the roman-catholic, or the protestant church. To believe the Word, credere Verbum, is the very first thing that decides with the man of the Church.

Again in another way and from another side: it is known from the Word that man has an external and an internal respiration; the external being out of the world, but the internal out of Heaven. When man dies the external respiration ceases, but the internal respiration which is quiet and imperceptible for him while he lives in the world, continues. "This respiration is entirely according to the affection of truth, thus according to the life of the faith of him", A.C. 9281. For "affection of truth, thus the life of the faith" we may read to believe, and Con-

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sequently "that the internal respiration is entirely according to the believing". Here it therefore appears that the internal respiration out of Heaven corresponds to the believing and that it determines and regulates itself according to the believing. And in respect of faith, fides, it may thus be said that to believe is the internal respiration of faith, quiet and imperceptible for man as long he lives in the world. Deprive faith of believing and you deprive it of its internal respiration, its breath chokes, its soul, spirit, and life from the Lord, and only the external respiration remains, as hurried and noisy as the love of self and of the world are great.

By this "quiet and imperceptible" being said of the internal respiration which is entirely according to the believing or the affection of the truth, another side again of this inexhaustible subject opens up, at first sight a quite unexpected new visual angle but which upon closer investigation is as surprising and of as far-reaching importance. In RATIONAL PSYCHOLOGY LXVI the Doctrine of Acoustics is given in short:

"That the differences of sound cannot exist nor be distinguished unless there be a certain common sound not discriminated or articulated, in which and under which the singular things can be discerned .... Such a sound is given by the whole skull, which is the reason why the ear is incut into the petrous and most porous bone; then also that musical instruments are the more distinct, perfect, and sonorous, as the strings are attached to a more tremulous board and table, which produces out of itself a common sound; but that that common sound, like the lumen itself, is not apperceived in the sound of the particulars”.

Just as there is the imperceptible internal respiration, there is also an imperceptible common sound; stringed instruments are the more perfect according as the strings are attached to a more tremulating sounding-board which produces the common sound out of itself. To make this more clear with an example: a Stradivarius of noble wood sounds more diversified, more perfect, and full of sound than those same violin-strings stretched on a packing case of pine wood. And elsewhere in the same work it is said that the hearing tremulates through the whole

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body and clarifies and purifies it. The conclusion of these two statements may easily be seen: the believing or the affection of truth - and stringed instruments signify the good and truth of faith - ennobles the natural mind to a subtle sounding-board which then produces out of itself a new, celestial, common sound. Where there is no believing, no affection of truth for the sake of life, there that which ought to be the sounding-board does not tremulate, and chirps one note only: "Faith, Faith, and nothing more", T.C.R. 391. They who are in faith without believing, with themselves and with others do not hear the affection, but mark the words only. They have a common sound, a sonus communis, left un-ennobled. The Angels on this matter have the most perfect perception because their sonus communis resounds from the celestial proprium, reproduces itself out of the Divine Human of the Lord. The more the human mind through door and hall of knowing and acknowledging has entered into the inner chamber of believing, from the deeper quiet of imperceptible and inapperceptible common sound it perceives the internal harmonies and dissonances. Only by believing the stringed instrument of the human mind receives its iridescent timbre, that aureole of sound. Simple believing makes simple, perfects, and ennobles the sounding-board of the mind; the heterogeneous things which counteracted the vibration and the tremulation are pushed out, the homogeneous things are clarified and purified; part after part the musical organ is renewed, re-created, regenerated; the common sound, the sonus communnis, the basis for the sound, is elevated, and on that account the faith, fides, the more diversified, perfect, full of sound. The play of the tunes is of faith, the common sound is of the believing. How would an orchestra, a choir sound, if it were not only externally attuned to be of pure sound, but also internally, according to the affection of each one separately. The natural man listens to a fine voice and appreciates the art of song where the spiritual man has long ago turned himself away, for in the voice he heard a voice of the blood, a voice of a very impure blood. How would the joint prayer and confession in the Church sound if it were not only externally attuned to be of pure faith but also internally, according to the affection of each one separately. It would

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be a speaking of Angels upon earth, entirely as in the MEMORABILIA it is repeatedly and in a thousand ways described as a rhythmic choir, as to harmony, the good, and as to melody, the truth. In believing each society of Angels is one, in faith each Angel is himself. A society, as in Heaven so also upon earth, is not a society except by homogeneous, purified, clarified believing, not except by the pure sonus communis, the noble common sound. Not only the internal respiration out of Heaven is according to the believing, but also the common sound of the sounding-board of our mind. When man from the Lord allows himself to be held in the good of innocence, when thus the man begins to believe all he thinks, the truths he knew and acknowledged for the first time become pure and sound forth more distinct, more perfect, more sonorous from an entirely vibrating mind which out of itself produces a celestial sonus communis, a. sonorous background against which the forms of sound shine as a painting in sparkling colours on crystal. "Faith, united, is like a picture drawn in beautiful colours on a transparent crystal", we read in T.C.R. 348; faith, united, is in believing, and the background of transparent crystal corresponds to the clear, pure, common sound of the transparent celestial proprium.

Seen in another series: Between having faith, fidem habere, and to believe, credere, there is a marriage of the true and the good. In A.C. 8994 we read: "Those who arc in spiritual perception, love women who are affected by the true things, but women who are in sciences they do not love; for it is according to the Divine order that men are in sciences but women only in affections, and thus that they do not love themselves out of the sciences but the men, whence the conjugial; thence also it is that it has been said by the Ancients, that women must be silent in the Church. Because it is so sciences, and cognitions are therefore represented by men, but affections by women .... But one must know that this is the case with those who are out of the spiritual kingdom of the Lord, but reversely with those who are out of the celestial kingdom; in this the husbands are in the affection but the wives in the cognitions of the good and the true; thence with them the conjugial".

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According to the law that when in the sense of the letter the one and the other are spoken of - as here man and woman and husband and wife - it is only one that is spoken of in the internal sense, A.C. 9149, we may here read a description of the relation of faith and believing in the spiritual man and of the relation of believing and faith in the celestial. For the man in sciences and cognitions is clearly the spiritual faith; the woman in affections the believing thereof. With the spiritual man the knowing and acknowledging is in the centre as the true surrounded by believing as the good out of the true. With the celestial man the believing is in the centre as the good, surrounded by faith as the true out of the good. "Those who are in spiritual perception do not love women who are in sciences" in this word there is a truth of life of the very greatest importance to be opened:

Unless man believes, he can never receive spiritual faith. A man by the desire of dominion and possession may be possessed to such an extent that he continuously enriches himself with sciences and cognitions; he may also be in a one-sided love or in a desire of the true for the sake of the true; in both instances the affection of the true for the sake of life or of believing is extinguished; or said in another way: the faculty of believing is perverted and put in the service of knowing and acknowledging; or said in another way: the inner chamber is broken down and drawn to the hall. There are those who have built an endless corridor of sciences and cognitions at the expense of the interior dwelling; such have remained natural and have only a science of the truths of faith, and thus no faith, for faith commences only with believing. A spiritual man is only he who believes, that is, from whose truth there emanates a good which surrounds it silently and lovingly. A withered, dry, hard, stiff, set, sour man can never be a spiritual man; what he has of affection is loving himself out of sciences.

If with the spiritual man faith is within and believing round about, with the celestial man the believing is within, flowing forth into cognitions of good and truth, which cognitions do not, as with the spiritual man, stand firm, but float, changing without end. They are for him as the representations in the Heavens, things of the Lord set forth, projected, outside of him from the internal mind. We might in this connection speak of three states and of

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three ages: I. a state of believing corresponding with childhood; II. a state of faith rising up out of the remains in that earlier believing and entirely overshadowing that, corresponding to the years of youth and manhood; III. a state of believing but now as internal innocence corresponding to old age. In the spiritual state the true things of faith were still regarded as a possession; they have to be retained [onthouden] because something is still detained [onthouden] from man - notice: onthouden has a twofold sense: we must retain [onthouden] that which by nature has been detained [onthouden] from us as if our own -; but in the celestial state the grasp of possession relaxes: out of the believing which has become internal the fountain of the pure True begins to spring into the eternal. The highest Angels from a distance, that is, as a sphere, appear like naked infants, that is, as innocences, as pure beliefs, but seen closer, that is, in respect of the power of truth out of good, as grown up statures, that is, as loves and wisdoms in perfect human form.

To know pertains to the years of boyhood, to acknowledge to the years of manhood, to believe to the years of old age. There is indeed, in the years of boyhood and manhood a believing, but it is as the good out of truth, but afterwards the state is inverted, and together with love believing rules entirely. Concerning those two states we read: "There are two states, the state of the true and the state of the good. In the state of the true man looks out of the world into Heaven, in the state of the good however he looks out of Heaven into the world. For in the first state the true things enter out of the world through the intellectual into the will and there become good things because they become of love. In the second state however the good things thus made out of Heaven go out through the will into the intellectual, and there appear in the form of faith. It is this faith that is saving, because it is out of the good of love, that is, through the good of love from the Lord; for that faith is of charity in a form", A. C. 9274.

Notice that in the first state faith is not spoken of; but only in the second state the truths, having become good, appear as that faith in the most eminent or only essential sense, which is of charity in a form. Do we not

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see, here again, that faith, fides, does not obtain its unique or sole essential sense except by believing, credere?

These two states are very strictly distinguished and may by no means be interchanged. He who is in the state of truth, cannot by what is continuous, pass over into the state of good, and the Lord in His parable concerning those who are in Judea, those who are on the roof, and those who are in the field, gave a sharp warning that he who is in the state of the good of his degree must by no means return to the previous state, that of truth.

To know stands at the door and may still pass by, to acknowledge is in the court and may still draw back, but to believe is in the inner room and may by no means leave. As soon as we begin to believe that which we in a given state and degree know and acknowledge, the Divine work of reformation and regeneration commences, which state in the Word is compared to the state of the silk-worm when it draws threads of silk out of itself and spins them, and after industrious toil flies into the air, and feeds, not as previously on leaves, but on the juices in the flowers, T. C. R. 571. Who is in the cocoon may not will to return to the caterpillar-state but must become a butterfly. To be in the cocoon is to be in the first state of believing, and accordingly to have entered into the state of transformation. Out of this believing he draws threads of truths of life out of himself, with which he gradually fences in his natural life, lays it to rest, puts it asleep. In this state the Lord leads him quietly from the literal sense, the leaves, to the internal sense or the Doctrine, the juices in the flowers. The Lord does unto him according to his word, a word of believing. Notice here again of what immense importance to life it is to have the word faith, fides, lit through by the word to believe, credere, as a sun, until "the light of the moon shall be as the light of the sun". As soon as we begin essentially to believe that which we know and acknowledge, our state must essentially change, fibre after fibre, thread after thread, or we pour new wine into old leather bags and sew a new patch on to an old garment. That believing for a time laces up all our liberty of movement, and an earthworm will regard a cocoon-chrysalis as a suicide, but this having to believe, this being obliged and willing to believe, leads to the

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soaring celestial liberty itself. Whoso hampers and violates this believing by the cares of life, robs himself of the soul of Faith and will never taste of the joy of eternal blessedness. To believe is penitence and repentance, conversion and total inversion or an entering into one's self, for how could man without this entering into himself draw and spin threads out of himself? The caterpillar gnaws leaves, the butterfly sucks flower-juice [the Dutch word for to suck, puren, means at the same time to purify, to refine]. The reading in the natural state is a devouring, the reading in the spiritual state is an eating, eating together with the Angels. In the caterpillar-state man looks, talks, and gabbles; in the butterfly state he regards, speaks, and is silent. The interim state, the state of the cocoon, is a state of believing, a state in which he as if from himself enters into the womb to be born again, from the Lord. The Lord's watchword: "Watch and pray" has reference to the omen out of Heaven from the Lord that to believe, credere, begins to dawn for him; he who does not notice this sign thereby foregoes his great day, and the thief in the night takes from him even that what he thought he had of faith, fides.

Another comparison from the Word:

The Doctrine of the Church is a ship, a ship laden with the good and true things of Faith. But a ship must sail; now to sail is to believe. What use have we for a ship which always remains in the dry-dock; what is the use of all embellishment thereof, all rigging out, if she does not put to sea - choose the sea we say in Dutch, and that word to choose in the angelic language of the Church has a mighty signification. The ship must choose the sea, and in the sea between the cliffs and rocks must find the warm gulf-stream of Providence, which stream the rolling and pitching vessel reaches in order, from then on, to glide forth, in a stately way and irresistibly, while her white sails catch the Wind and the Stars guide her course. If we do not sail, we are only helmsmen ashore, men of theoretic knowledge, quite possibly full of science about faith, but without any believing; in short, men of faith alone. These too sail, but in their imagination, that is, in a believing which is man's and not the Lord's, in a ship which is indeed

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from the Lord, but without the Lord therein. In T.C.R. 462 such a flying in the air with seven sails is described and it is said that they are images of pride and ideal thoughts which are called phantasies. If we read the description of these insane sailors from within, we then see that they have separated the believing from faith, and by way of faith have made great a believing themselves and a loving themselves. It is there even openly announced: "Have you not thus removed from man not only charity itself and its works from faith ... but also faith itself, as to its manifestation in the sight of God"? Removing faith itself from man, as to its manifestation in the sight of God, is robbing faith of all believing, and thus throwing overboard, as ballast, the very first with the man of the Church, believing the Word, and thus sailing for a time in the air and not entering into the stream of Providence, but getting miserably stranded in a desert, later to share the lot in hell with the machiavelians, by which is represented that their semblance of faith at bottom is related to cunning politics. Faith without believing behaves itself like a phantastic ship in the air, or, to make use of a previous image, as a caterpillar with wings - a flying fiery snake.

Two other quotations:

A. C. 7780: "And because the first-born is faith, he is the true in one complex, for the true is of faith because it must be believed”.

"One must know that the true things of faith that proceed immediately out of the good of charity, are those that are in the first place, for they are good things in form; the true things however which are in the last place are naked true things; for when the true things are derived successively, they in every degree recede from good, and at last become naked true things", ibidem.

It is first said of the true things that they are of faith when they are believed. Afterwards, that they are believed when - purified from the Lord in the good of innocence — they proceed immediately out of the good of charity, for then they are goods in form. Since to believe the Word is the very first with the man of the Church, it is clear that the truths of faith which proceed immediately out of this believing are in the first place, and are goods in form.

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Just by keeping well in mind the series to know-acknowledge-believe, the words: "because it must be believed" receive their essential meaning. Otherwise in reading we pass over these words as over a worn-down self-evident fact. The truth of faith must not be known and acknowledged, but must be believed. The worldling just turns the series the other way about and says derisively: "You say that you believe, thus you do not know for sure". He takes believing to be uncertain thinking, while, on the contrary, it is thinking free from phantasies.

The true things within the sphere of the good of innocence and of charity are goods in form, and in their derivations without become naked true things. This teaches us that the Doctrine of the Church lies within the sphere of the good of innocence and of charity, and that the true things thence proceeding hold the first place and not the naked true things. Notice also the expression "in every degree". This teaches us that man in every degree has to arrive at the believing in that degree. Said with a view to life, we must not imagine that in a given degree we have enough if we know and acknowledge, and are able to persuade ourselves that the believing will come right later on. A loose popular Dutch expression with. a negative meaning says: "I believe it", but has the signification: "I care nothing at all about it". It is just things of this kind that prove to what depth this very first word of the Lord in His Coming and Second Coming has slid down, and how very necessary it is to re-install this word and this matter in the very first place; and that very first place is before the opened Word on the altar, a place of holiest fear. To approach and to touch the Word with the sole-saving faith, in spite of the warning of the angel "Believing", leads to that explosion which is described in T.C.R. 162; and that explosion occurs in every degree where the circle of to know-acknowledge-believe is not full, and lets one "lie as if dead for about an hour", that is, leads to a practically complete, eternal spiritual death.

Outside of any state of believing, all truths of the Word and of faith are not naked truths but mere words. Faith, fides, is not a celestial word unless to believe, credere, is inherent in it. For this reason tile Word not only says

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"to have faith and to believe", but also "to have faith or to believe". We now no longer regard this as a synonym which weakens, but as a synonym which strengthens and raises the mind up into the Heaven of Innocence itself. To Believe and Faith keep equal step; faith, fides, cannot advance farther than in so much as to believe, credere, follows, and vice versa; and not the least more or less. In the one state to believe appears as pertaining to faith, in the other state faith appears as pertaining to believe; until when love rules, that is, when man from the Lord has endured all successive temptations to the bitter end, "charity becomes the charity of faith, and faith becomes the faith of charity", as says A.C. 8159. Outside of believing, words as "love" and "charity" are only terms to fence with. It is this which, in a thousand ways, has to be made clear, and which in every state and degree should be in­scribed on the mind as a New Name of the Lord, called ONLY BELIEVE.

To believe the Word, credere Verbum.

Every part of the Word corresponds to some society of Angels; every society of Angels corresponds to some part of the body. To believe the Word therefore is, as to soul and body to stand under the uninterrupted healing and renewing influence from the Lord through the Heavens. The Lord continually orders the Heavens. To believe the Word is continually to partake of that ordering. To believe the Word is to stand in that cone of light which sends down the Divine True into the lowest Heavens and gives to man in enlightenment - that is, the man who believes and who "makes true", and no one else - the faculty of believing. It sounds like a paradox that one who believes should receive the faculty of believing. But that paradox stands on a line with these words of the Lord: "To him who has, to him shall be given". For there are two believings and the second is following the first. To make this more clear: a source of light from above throws down a cone of light on the ground. It is then possible to be within this cone of light or outside of it. Who stands outside of this cone, may turn towards it or away from it. If he turns away, he stares into darkness, scantily illuminated nevertheless by the reflection of light from the cone of

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light behind him; the nearby objects are still somewhat visible in a certain glow, but those farther off shade away in the dark into phantasies. Of such a man it is said that he loves the darkness more than the light. For those however, who turn themselves to it from afar it is said: "A people that walketh in darkness shall see a great light: they that dwell in the land of the shadow of death, upon them shall the light shine", Is. IX : 2. Here is the first believing, in semi-darkness for the present, having still many parts that are dark. This believing is as a kind of presence of the Lord but not yet the full presence. It is to believe, in potency, but not yet in the full power of the faculty. To believe good and truth only commences when man allows himself to be drawn from the Lord within the cone of light, which does not happen until all those temptations have been endured as from one's self, and have been withstood entirely from the Lord alone, which were necessary to disperse those dark parts. Having entered into the circle of light it is for the first time possible to speak of an eye that is single and of a body "having no part dark", LUKE XI : 36. Now commences the faculty of believing "that it is so", that is to say, that only the celestial things are; the internal eye is opened and man sees out of the celestial light and not except out of that. He is entirely warmed through and shone through by the Sun of Heaven, with a body of which each organ has become new. Outside of the cone of light he was like a caterpillar, on the border of the cone of light he was like a chrysalis in the cocoon, inside the cone of light like a butterfly. There are those who from the darkness wish to rush immediately to the light; but such are like moths who fly into the flame and are burnt. Here again we arrive at a new distinction: man must believe that that believing exists_, by which at some time he will be entirely in the Lord and the Lord entirely in him. He must believe that some day he will believe. This first believing is purely of free choice. If we hearken well to this word "free choice" we shall see comprised therein the two faculties of man, the voluntary and the rational; for the free regards the voluntary, and the choice the rational, and indeed not the merely rational, but the rational out of that voluntary. Choice is correlated with the affection, the feeling, and thus with the will; thence

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the word willekeur [arbitrariness], neither will nor choice. The Lord leaves to man the free choice, and at bottom the free choice therefore amounts to this: to believe or not to believe. To believe is to accept all the consequences of believing, and we have seen that these consequences overrule in everything and are entirely destructive of the old proprium. In each state, there is a difference of degree between to know, to acknowledge, and to believe. In each state there are temptations to be endured and to be withstood in order from to know to arrive at to acknowledge, and from to acknowledge at to believe. Whoso stops halfway turns his back on the circle of light that awaited him, and looks back to the outermost darkness where all that he thought he saw dissolves again into phantasies. "Seek ye first the Kingdom of God" is the great call, the urgent invitation to stride on to a pure believing, to cleanse one's self from all those heterogeneous things that shut man out from the pure believing - having no part dark. The wise virgins had a pure believing, the foolish virgins unbelieving and superstition. In the first believing the interior and the exterior man become one, and when these two are one the man receives the Lord Himself in His full presence; he then no longer believes there is a Word, but he believes in the Word. This is to believe the Word, credere Verbum in its fulness, in its glory, in its might; for then for the first time and to eternity man stands actually in consociation with each society of Heaven in turn, which consociation in a corresponding way continually orders anew each part of his body to ever more essential uses.

This first believing and this last believing are to be understood by these words: "The natural of man is the first that receives the true things out of the Word from the Lord and it is that which is regenerated the last. and when it is regenerated the whole man is regenerated", A.C. 9325. And let us then well understand that if man is regenerated, his faith is a form of believing. The circle of light as the base of the cone of light then represents that arcanum given in A.C. 9334: "Man's regeneration in the world is only a plane in order to perfect the life of him into the eternal". Man first embraced faith with believing, finally man embraces the believing as the

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Lord with the faith that is the Lord's, the opposite of the Judas-kiss. Now in this connection the thrice repeated question of the Lord becomes clear: "Peter, lovest thou Me?" Peter represents Faith, fides, and the question is:

Is Believing, credere, therein; is the Lord therein? Peter sinking down into the waves, represents .a faith that does not rest on and in a believing. Whoso separates the believing from faith, will drown. Will drown, or perish in the way as is said in Psalm II : 12: "Kiss the Son, lest He be angry and ye perish in the way, when His wrath is kindled but a little. Blessed are all they that put their trust in Him"; where to kiss the Lord, whose Divine Human is the Son, signifies to be conjoined to Himself by faith of love, A.C. 3574. The faith of love is the faith of believing or the believing in form. "Who put their trust in Him" is there said - Latin confidentes in Ipso, from the verb confidere, not credere - which is a being together in the things of the Lord. What number of arcana lie enclosed in the simple word "to believe"! For visibly to have faith and to believe flow together into to have faith or to believe; now the hands are laid crosswise as in the blessing by Israel, now they are parallel; now it is to see and to believe, now again not to see and nevertheless to believe; now the believing is represented in the faith, now again the faith in the believing; all according to the series or the sequence. Therefore it is said in D.L.W.: "There are several things as well of love as of wisdom; ... all those things are indeed of each of them, but they are named according to that which preponderates and is nearer by", n. 363. Here again read for love and wisdom to believe and faith, and you will see how these two are intermarried. To him who begins to perceive the word "to believe" an alarming sea in life opens, storm-swept, of which the winds let loose can be rebuked by the Lord alone. Let us in this connection re-read MATTHEW XIV: 22-33, .and let us understand how Jesus constrained His disciples to get into the ship and to sail before Him, how the ship was in the midst of the sea, being tossed with the waves, for the wind was contrary; how Jesus in the fourth watch of the night came down to them walking on the sea, and was taken for a ghost; and how Peter, who represents faith, said: Lord, if it be Thou, bid me come unto Thee on the

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water; and how he then climbed down, but seeing the wind boisterous, became afraid, and beginning to sink, cried:

Lord, save me; and Jesus, immediately stretching forth His hands, caught him, and said unto him: a thou of little faith, wherefore didst thou doubt? In that passage Peter wishes to come to the Lord as faith to believing, and halfway he would have been drowned if the Lord had not forthwith stretched out His hands and caught him. A representation of the Church in every state.

What the Angels think they believe. This word teaches that with the Angels all things of faith fully pertain to believing. Faith and believing in the human-angelic body have their seat in the cerebrum and the cerebellum respectively. They are related as the voluntary and the involuntary, concerning which the ARCANA CELESTIA in n. 9683 towards the end teaches: "The voluntary things of man continually lead away from order, but the involuntary things continually lead back to order. Thence it is that the motion of the heart, which is involuntary, is plainly exempt from the will of man, similarly the action of the cerebellum, and that the motion of the heart and the powers of the cerebellum rule the voluntary things lest these run beyond the limits, and extinguish before the time the life of the body; therefore the acting principles out of the one and the other, namely as well out of the involuntary things as out of the voluntary things in the whole body go forth conjoined. These things have been said in order that the idea of the immediate and the mediate influx of the celestial things of love and of the spiritual things of faith from the Lord may in some measure be illustrated". Now it belongs to the celestial free of the Angels that their voluntary things freely allow themselves to be ruled by the in­voluntary; their cerebrum is continually subordinated to their cerebellum: what they think they believe.

"Hearken, daughter. and consider; and incline thine ear; and forget thy people and thy father's house".

PSALM XLV : 10.

And now by way of a diversion of charity, and by way of a contribution to the HANDBOOK OF THE SOCIETY we would consider the picture on the opposite page for the

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sake of the representation which it may give to the man of the Church. Let it be expressly premised that we do not enter into any consideration of art; that should remain farther away than far. Art should be for confirmation of perception and in no way for the cultivation of taste. To taste applies what is said of the science of the senses namely that it is "purely animal, but not rational and truly human", RATIONAL PSYCHOLOGY XXXI. And further to remain entirely free from person, history, and legend, we advance what is said in MEMORABILIA n. 6091:

“Genevieve sometimes appears to the Parisians above on a mediate height, and in a splendid garment, and with a face as it were holily Divine, beautiful, she is seen by many; and there are those who wish to invocate, then the face is changed, and becomes as another woman, and she scolds them, that it is forbidden to be worshippers of men and of women, and this unto shame, saying that she is among vulgar women, and is not more esteemed than another woman; she is in a certain society were she is not known, esteemed lightly there; and that she knows nothing at all of those who are in the world, still less hears or perceives anything, being astonished that the men of the world are captivated by such trifles. She also said that she was not among the better ones, and that one who wants to be greater than others, will be more vile than others, and that it is harmful to many that they have been made saints, because when they hear this they swell up out of hereditary evil, and begin to be proud and thence they are removed, where they do not know themselves who they have been in the world".

This wall-painting also in the series out of which it rises, is the only one in which the person is entirely free from the adoring saints' legend, and therefore deserves a more interior consideration, this in the belief that the painter here was affected by a celestial influx and gave that a form which to the man of the Church may present a remembrance of celestial things. Thus we do not here consider an externally finely painted roman-catholic saint's image, but the inherent idea of the sacredness of the Primitive Christian Church represented in the most simple indications - the holiness and a saint here well understood as what has wholly followed the Lord, has become hole in following the Lord.

Just as a society of Angels may appear as one man, just so a Church-society here appears in one human shape, the integer core of the Primitive Christian Church with a few. That it is the Primitive Christian Church is in-

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dicated by the moonlit night, for it is known from the Word that that Christian Church is related to the Jewish Church as a moonlit night to a dark night. Here the integer core of the Primitive Christian Church is represented in the form of a faithful, prudent servant who watches and prays; does not the burning oil lamp inside indicate the wise virgin? That it is the core of the Primitive Church remaining with a few appears from the whole of this woman's stature, a wonderfully sad mixture of a modest virgin, a chaste wife, a patient widow; the watching therefore is a waiting and an expecting of the Second Coming out of a full, pure, deep believing, quiet as the internal respiration. In this stature the Lord's words vibrate: "Learn of Me; for I am meek and lowly in heart; and ye shall find rest unto your souls". This stature breathes that rest, possessing its soul in its patience. It might in future times belong to a diversion of charity and a game of wisdom to put up such a picture in a college with this task: Regard this as the centre of a triptych and in a similar style to the right and the left of it design an image of the Churches before the Coming and at the time of the Second Coming.

The town upon which this woman looks down is not any definite town but the Doctrine of the Primitive Christian Church in its original integrity preserved by a few, summarily indicated by its street of angular houses with a round house on the foreground, by its walls and fortified towers. Has there been made known to this quiet, solitary woman the time of visitation, the abomination of desolation, that with all peace such unspeakable sadness emanates from her? On her night-watch depends the conjunction with the Heavens, and it is as if the whole earth in that slumbering landscape with full confidence trusts in her faithfulness, in her expectation of the New Jerusalem, descending from God out of Heaven, in her watching and praying therefor, with the faith of the simple in a simple believing, of which those fair flowers in the earthen pot are the symbol, wrapped in deep shadow.

How meet it is for us, raising this image as a representation above every literal idea, to humble ourselves before it. The practically averted face does not show itself "holily Divine, beautiful", but rather as that of an ordinary

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woman, and the serious expression testifies to an inward life, far removed from the trifles of the world, from the sanctification by the unsaintly, from the deification by the ungodly, but just for this very reason so sad at the consideration of the decay. In the Memorable Relation referred to, by the person of Genevieve the integer core of the Church is described, kept from the Lord in the good of innocence and of charity and thus safeguarded; and in this painting we see a representation thereof. Such was the life of the Primitive Christians, a life of believing the Word, a life thus of remaining in the Word and being made free by the truth. If we would be more than these others, would we then not become less than these others? Mark that doorpost and sill, and inside, that wall against which there is a straight-lined chest under the burning oil lamp: they evoke a dwelling as in the Heavens so also upon the earth, a dwelling entirely in correspondence with this godly life; or with this godevormiche life, to use a striking old Dutch expression; a life lived from within, and not mixed and therefore soiled by anything from without. A life “monotonous as the black soil on which roses flower" as the Word says. A life far away from all seeming culture. If we were to be allowed to enter into this dwelling - and even in our idea with never enough of scruple - we would become acquainted with a life of which each smallest piece of houseware is a representative; the spiritual just as much as the natural, exterior dwelling of the Primitive Christians. And if we then look up from this representation into our homes, what shame on us. The former dwelling breathes consecration out of Heaven, in ours the world blows a cosy, artistic, interesting sphere, all it can. If the Church of the Coming of the Lord had such consecration, then how much the more should this be inherent in the Church of the Second Coming of the Lord, and with that in each life and each dwelling. This woman's stature has remained free and pure from the unbelief and superstition of her age; but what of us with our "culture" and with our "taste"? Or could you imagine this Primitive Christian Society with our culture and our taste, degenerated_, run wild, rotten? The core of that Society had one culture only, depicted in that sleeping city before her: the Doctrine of her Church. There is one culture only for the Church of the Second

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Coming of the Lord, and it is that of the New Jerusalem descending; in no city but that shall we be able to truly live; and nothing, nothing whatever, can come to us from elsewhere as culture except from believing the Word, credere Verbum, “as the fountain of wisdom, the source of life, and the way to Heaven”, as our creed runs.

If we enter into the thought concerning this example of a Primitive Christian dwelling, then do we not remember the saying that the Ancients in their homes and temples set up images that were representatives and made them bear in mind the celestial and spiritual things? Also in the Primitive Christian Church the art that wrought those images returned in its anonymous celestial essence; but with the decay of that Church, art also again fell away, and down into the sensual provinces of mere taste, that is, into the exteriorly beautiful, the form that is empty because of its not corresponding to anything. Also in this dwelling we would find images or paintings, but just as this primitive, pure, simple life, altogether taken up into the Natural of the Lord's Divine Human, "having no part dark". If that chest under the oil lamp were to be opened, you would find there everything that is said in the Word of the dwellings of virgins in Heaven, in a similar blessed order, spotlessly clean changes of raiment, embroidery work under hand with the requisites thereto, and in the place of honour some rare books and writings, the Word and nothing but what is out of the Word. In short no "trifles such as the men of the world are captivated by".

Must not our lives, on our plane, in the midst of this barren, rude, and barbaric time, in each state be in correspondential consociation with the life of the society of which this pure stature before us gives a representation? Do not in this stature truths of life that are entirely out of the Word of the Lord, lie quietly preserved, while most truths of life with us remain only cheap worldly wisdom, exterior morals? Are we as the men and women of that Church, full of a new human simplicity and humility, or do we wish to be more than those others according to and in life, that is, at the same time ladies and gentlemen, highly cultured, that is, cultured in semblance, acquainted with everything, taking part in everything? If we were to see this representative figure, next to our society re-

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presented as one man, would we then not be frightened at the thickly dark parts, the empty, dead, filthy spots in that image, full of moth- and rust-holes of unbelief and superstition? Of unbelief from love of self, of superstition from love of the world, taken all together the same whorish civilization in semblance, as in the world, so too in every larger and smaller society of the Crowning Church of the Lord's Second Coming.

If we do not put away out of our lives the hotbed of spontaneous generation out of the hell of the world, then the spontaneous creation out of Heaven can never begin. And all that is being waited for is that spontaneous creation of Heaven upon earth, of the culture of the New Jerusalem; that is the day- and night-watch of the Doctrine which wishes to gather us together under its wings as a hen does her chickens. This is said especially to the women of the Church. For if woman is excluded from the most provinces of the intellectual of man, then what else is there for her to do but with a great love and thus with a great believing to make true (gelovigen), that is, to embody the Divine things brought down out of the Doctrine? For this reason the core of the Primitive Christian Church here stands before us in a woman's stature; let us he able to put forward a woman in comparison.

Of true conjugial love it is said that it does not further heap up hereditary evil in the children, but brings it to a stand and to retreat. What an overwhelmingly delightful promiseOf the Faith of the Church and the life according to it may likewise be said that it does not further heap up unbelief and superstition in her children, but brings them to a stand and to retreat, disperses them, so that in their inmost a firm spirit is renewed, a spirit of believing, of believing the Word and nothing but the Word as the only fountain, the only source. Then the Lord inflows into them with believing, credere; and they take up again the Lord who is in that angelic believing, in the true things of Doctrine and of faith, fides, with them out of the Word, for the mutual conjunction with the Lord for a celestial marriage, SACRED SCRIPTURE FROM EXPERIENCE 8 and D.P. 28.

In that wall-painting that Primitive Christian Society may to all outward appearance be an ordinary woman, to our opened eyes she is a peeress, of whom everything-

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attitude, posture, expression of the face, gesture, hand, garment and every fold of the headdress - testifies to the unstained nobility of that original Church of the Lord, to her unshaken, simple, great, pure believing in the Second Coming, to her prayerful watching to be allowed to see the glory of this our present day.

In our jointly spoken creed our society also sounds as one man; let us thereto- cleanse the common sound, the sonus communis of all in each one_, of each in all, in order that our speaking may be in correspondence to the rhythmic speaking of the Angels in a choir, and not remain a medley of filthy bloods, a chiming together of church­-organ and barrel-organ. When we confess together that we believe in the Lord Jesus Christ, in the Sacred Scripture, in the Second Coming, in the new Angelic Heaven, in the spiritual sense of the Word, in the Heavenly Doctrine of the New Jerusalem, in the New Christian Church, in the communion of Angels and men, in repentance of sins, in the life of charity, in the resurrection of man, in the judgment after death, and in eternal life - what then must there not wave through us, heavenward, having strength in Heaven, and moving it with might, and making it answer with might? What would not be inherent in believing if man were in it I believe is not only to confess Faith, but also gelove lien, that is, to acknowledge one's self vanquished with a broken spirit, a broken and a contrite heart, "which Thou, O God, wilt not despise", PSALM LI : 17; it is not only to believe but also gelovigen, that is, to make true; it is "to be not far any more from the Kingdom of God". Our creed is not only a weekly divine service, but a daily divine worship with the life, and thence the Sunday joint Glorification which opens the Heavens, Heavens full of inexpressible things. The word I believe - must overwhelm us on account of the infinite Divine Mercy which in answer thereto bends down over our bottomless humiliation out of the realization at the same time glowing with a sense of shame that we still believe so bitterly little.

I believe, Lord, help Thou mine unbelief.

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DE HEMELSCHE LEER

EXTRACTS FROM THE ISSUE FOR JUNE 1936

COMMUNICATIONS.

In Divine Worship we profess to believe in the Lord; this confession is not living if our entire life does not fully make true the acknowledgment which is inherent therein, namely that to believe in means to live in and to move in. To believe in the communion of Angels, is already to be taken up into the angelic society, or else it is merely a repeating on trust, with the lips only, upon authority or from custom. To believe is to live the Faith, so much so that everything which happens in this life on earth, happens according to correspondences and thus is valid in the Heavens.

The New from which the New Church derives its name, and which is also meant in the words of the Lord: "See, I make all things new", APOCALYPSE XXI: 5, dwells only in what is its own.

Among the English speaking members of the Church the expression New Churchman is current. This is a word designating a purely natural state. It does not save man that he belongs to a church, is connected with a church, or is in a church; but man is saved when the Church is in him, when man himself is Church. From Churchman he must become man-Church; that is, man-Angel. As New Churchman man still glories in and refers himself to an external organization with all human appurtenances thereof; as man-Church he places all his trust entirely in the only Lord in His Word.

Anton Zelling.

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"Now it is permitted to enter intellectually into the arcana of faith". This is the glorious promise given to the

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New Church, the grant of nobility it has received from the Lord. But if a Divine promise is not received by us with trembling reverence, it may become a curse instead of a blessing. And let us beware of the illusion that "to enter intellectually into the arcana" should signify a reasoning about the arcana in the way against which the Latin Word so often warns. He who with open eyes and a perceptive mind enters a beautiful building, does not think of running through all apartments and casting inquisitive glances all around. He will stand breathless with delight, he will not be able to satisfy himself with what he looks upon; soon he will be overcome and depart radiant, with the fixed determination of soon returning. And one who sees him leave will be able to detect in his entire attitude that he has truly seen the beauty. So will one who comes to us from without and who will wish to know whether we have truly entered into the arcana, not be able to conclude this from the fact whether we are able to reason sagaciously and to explain everything minutely; but in the glance of our eyes and in the sound of our voice he must be able to trace that we have stood face to face before the Divine Truth.

Chs. H. van Os.

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"Jesus said unto him, I say not unto thee, until seven times, but until seventy times seven", MATTHEW XVIII: 22. The teaching of these words of the Lord is that forgiveness must be infinite, and not finite, thus that it must be from the Lord and not from man. All forgiveness which is limited is from man or from self, and has self-love in it; all genuine forgiveness is from the Divine mercy of the Lord with man. As long as there is any question of forgiving or not forgiving it is an indication that it is from self, thus that it is not genuine. The Divine forgiveness, however, does not appear to those who are in evil.

If a man's brother appears to sin against him, he either opposes the things of the proprium, that is evils and falsities, in which case there is no reason for forgiveness; or he opposes the things of the angelic proprium, that is goods and truths; such opposition is against the Lord and therefore can only be forgiven by the Lord with man.

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"Ye have heard that it hath been said, thou shalt not forswear thyself; but thou shalt perform unto the Lord thine oaths. I truly say unto you, swear not at all, neither by heaven, because it is God's throne, nor by the land, because it is His footstool, neither by Jerusalem, because it is the city of the great king; neither shalt thou swear by thine own head, because thou canst not make one hair white or black. Truly let thy speech be yea, yea, nay, nay, because what is beyond this is out of evil", MATTHEW V : 33-37.

In the above passage by Heaven is meant the internal sense of the Word or the Divine Truth in Heaven; by the land is meant the literal sense of the Word which is in the Church; by Jerusalem is meant the Doctrine of the Church out of the Word; by head is signified man's faith; by hairs are meant truths in the external man from the Doctrine of the Church, which he sees from others and not by illustration from the Lord.

The general teaching of the text is that truths are not to be confirmed from man but from the Lord; see the ARCANA CELESTIA 9166.

The teaching of these words of the Lord is that one may not make an external bond of the internal sense of the Word, nor of its literal sense, nor of the Doctrine of the Church, nor of those things which he sees from himself,

The natural man makes to himself external bonds of such things, by which he is compelled and by which he would compel others; but as such a man lacks all perception none of these things within the man are genuine, that is, they have not the Lord within them but self, even although in themselves these things may be true and from the Lord.

Those who are internal men are not compelled by such external bonds, yet it is permitted them to use such things to confirm themselves and others. Men who are still more interior do not confirm truth by the internal sense of the Word, nor by the literal sense of the Word, nor by the Doctrine of the Church, nor by their own understanding; for such men are free, and the freedom in which they are is the Lord's freedom with them. These are they of whom it is said: "The wind bloweth where it willeth, and thou hearest the sound thereof, but canst not tell whence it cometh and whither it goeth: so is everyone that is born of the Spirit", JOHN III : 8.

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The teaching concerning the sole authority of the Word, and also concerning the authority of Doctrine, while in itself true, is with many an external bond by which they are bound and with which they would bind others - they swear by it. With others it is an internal bond of conscience, by which they confirm themselves and others.

The time is coming when men will come into freedom itself and rationality itself which are wholly of the Lord; then will these bonds drop away, then will be fulfilled the Prophecy of JEREMIAH: "And they shall teach no more every man his neighbor, and every man his brother, saying: Know Jehovah; for they shall all know Me", XXXI: 34.

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The Lord the conjoining Sphere.

"Angels and angelic societies are conjoined and also disjoined in accordance with spheres .... Whether you say Angels and angelic societies out of which the spheres are, or truth and good, it is the same, for the spheres are out of the affections of truth and good, by virtue of which the angels are Angels from the Lord. Be it known that in so far as these spheres draw from the Lord, so far they conjoin; but in so far as they draw out of the angel's proprium, so far they disjoin. From this it is evident that the only Lord conjoins", A.C. 9606.

The "propriums of the angels" which disjoin, are all human and personal things within which is not the Divine Human of the Lord. Such things would disrupt Heaven and the Church, if they were not held in quiescence by might of the Lord's Divine Human; whenever the Church turns its eyes from the Divine Human of the Lord such things do break forth and disrupt.

The Divine Human of the Lord is present with man in so far as it orders by means of Divine Truth the human and personal things and comes to dwell therein, casting all heterogeneous things in which it cannot dwell, to the circumference. It is the personal and human things with man which always crucify the Lord. If a man can be regenerated, the Lord finally subjugates all that is merely human and personal, and then He is resurrected with man.

To worship the Lord in so far as the Divine Truth does

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not touch what is human and personal, is to worship the Father, which even the devils can do.

In mutual love and its internal conversation the Lord gives the one what he shall say and the other what he shall respond, and then He becomes the conjoining sphere by which the two are united. Especially is this true of Conjugial Love. Hence it is that the Lord is Conjugial Love; and every love between married partners in which the Lord is not the all in all, is not Conjugial Love but the love of the sex. Hence it can be seen that Conjugial Love can only exist in so far as all merely human and personal things are rejected to the circumference. There cannot even be friendship between married partners in which the Lord is not the all in all, except in the outermost circle, the proprium, which must remain quiescent.

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The Lord the conjoining Medium.

Mutual Love and the Friendship of Love. It has been shown here above that whatever of word or deed passes from man to man and is reciprocated in mutual love is of the Lord, and that the Lord is also the sphere which is the conjoining medium.

In contrast to mutual love and charity is what is called in the Word "the friendship of love". The friendship of love is all friendship in which the Lord does not dwell with good and truth, all friendship which is on account of person.

The characteristic of mutual love and charity is that it has Divine Mercy from the Lord in it and thence looks to eternal blessedness, and that it does not regard what

is merely temporal; it is therefore not indulgent, nor turned from its path by pity.

On the other hand the friendship of love is for person; it is full of human compassion and from pity would remove all temporal sorrows and suffering, but has no regard for the eternal; it easily changes to the opposite extreme of hatred and revenge, if one counters the will of the other.

The friendship of love is often particularly strong between those of intimate family relationship, in which case it has within it particularly the love of self in the other. It is most compassionate.

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There is nothing more deceptive than intense compassion and great sympathy; with a preacher, an orator, a musician, or an artist such human emotions can if possible deceive the very elect, and yet such human compassion is the opposite to Divine Mercy, it is of the friendship of love which opposes all genuine charity,

What direful results the friendship of love with its human compassion has, is described at length in the Word, particularly in the TRUE CHRISTIAN RELIGION, n. 446-449.

Before regeneration human and personal things make a man's life, and the internal wealth of his life without which he would seem utterly poor and miserable no matter what else he possessed; it is these possessions which are the most hard to give up and which are particularly meant by riches in the following:

"Verily, I say unto you that a rich man shall hardly enter into the Kingdom of Heaven, and again I say unto you, it is easier for a camel to go through the eye of a needle, than for a rich man to enter into the Kingdom of God. When His disciples heard it they were exceedingly amazed, saying: Who then can be saved? But Jesus beheld them, and said unto them: with man this is impossible, but with God all things are possible. Then answered Peter and said unto Him: Behold, we have forsaken all and followed Thee; what shall we have therefore? And Jesus said unto them: Verily I say unto you that ye which have followed Me in the regeneration, when the Son of Man shall sit in the throne of His glory, ye also shall sit upon twelve thrones judging the twelve tribes of Israel, and everyone that hath forsaken houses, or brethren, or sisters, or father, or mother, or wife, or children, or lands for My sake, shall receive an hundredfold, and shall inherit everlasting life. But many first shall be last; and the last first", MATTHEW XIX: 23-30.

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Leaves, Blossom and Fruit. The leaves of a tree represent intellectual truths, or truths in the understanding, the truths which are of a man's faith, and by which his understanding is reformed. A young tree at first has leaves as a preparation, but no blossoms or fruit; but if when the time comes it does not bear fruit, it is cursed like the fig-tree.

The leaves represent the Divine truths as abstract things

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of faith. But when Divine truth touches a man's spiritual body, when it touches man's human and personal things, man comes before a new choice. He either rejects the Divine truth as it touches his personal and human things, or he believes; if a man then believes, he comes into the wisdom of life, and it is this wisdom of life in which he believes that is represented by the blossoms. When the wisdom of life becomes of life, then a man bears fruit.

Man passes through two dangers. The first danger is that he will expect the leaves to turn or develop into fruit, while it is only the blossom that can develop into fruit. As the leaves cannot develop into fruit, the man as it were hangs artificial fruit on the tree, but which is not living and has no connection with the tree; it may make the tree look beautiful like a Christmas tree; but the fruit is unfit for spiritual nourishment.

The second danger is that the blossoms will be bitten by the frost, or blown off by the wind and rain, for they are very delicate, and if harmed they do not grow into fruit.

The belief in the things of the wisdom of life as it touches man's life is very beautiful like a fruit-tree blossoming in the spring. But the man must beware lest he stand in admiration of the blossoms, instead of guarding the tree, lest a frost come and the blossoms fail to develop into fruit.

Theodore Pitcairn.

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"In so much as the truths of life become of life, in just so much the truths of faith become of faith, and not the least more or less. Some belong to science and not to faith", CANONS, End of the Prologue.

In the measure in which the signification of these words, chosen as the motto of the Swedenborg Societas for 1936, penetrates to us, they will prove to be indispensable for the determination of our spiritual state. It clearly comes to view that our faith is not genuine than in so much as it is based on living the truths from the Word and the Doctrine of the Church, and that our life is not genuine than in so far as it is the embodiment of these same things. Without faith therefore no life and without life no faith. What stands outside of this conjunction, stands outside of the Kingdom of the Lord.

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When in the Name of the Lord we have begun to combat our proprium and thus accept these words as the measuring rule for our life, this command of the Lord appears as a promise that He will certainly enrich us with spiritual and celestial things, as far as our state permits of this. When we are in temptations, this word will strengthen and encourage us, making us mindful that after this night a new morning will dawn, with a new Coming of the Lord, which also in our mind will "make all things new".

In the work ON THE SACRED SCRIPTURE OR THE WORD OF THE LORD FROM EXPERIENCE, n. XIII, we read that no spirit or Angel is permitted to instruct any man on this earth in Divine true things, but that the Lord Himself teaches through the Word.

Spirits and Angels with reference to man signify exterior and interior true things. Man cannot by the true things of a preceding state by themselves be elevated to new, more interior true things. But man by the actual living of these is prepared to be enlightened from the Lord, and thus by an ever renewed and ever more interior conjunction with the Lord Himself, he is led into an ever deeper understanding of the Word, and by this to new states of the true and thence to new states of the good.

Here again it clearly appears that the Doctrine of the Church is Divine, that man cannot think out or conclude this Doctrine, but that it is revealed from the Lord to those who are worthy to receive it.

C. P. Geluk.

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Self examination, leading to knowledge of self and finally to wisdom of life, can be based only on the comparison of one's own state with that of the Lord and a testing of the qualities of one's self on those of the Lord as Man. These states are described in the Arcana Coelestia, the Books of the Second Coming, the Third Testament, treating of the states of the Lord at the time of His Coming, of which we are told in the New Testament, but which are indicated in the simplest way in the words of the Old Testament which already contains everything of

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His Coming and His Second Coming. For this reason the wisdom of life of the man of the New Church is based purely and exclusively on the conjoined Testaments, and it is the conscious living of the Lord's states in one's self, as if from one's self, by revelations, by the Word in the Church.

N. J. Vellenga.

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Ever anew we meet with places in the Word that distress us because of their obscurity and internally keep us engaged. Try and forget. Always later on something happens in our lives which then makes those truths true for us. What then springs forth, clear, from the living memory, was previously a hard impenetrable "object" against which we collided. Also when the true has become an organic part of our spiritual body, part of it remains an object, but now as a last plane in which the living soul thereof may mirror itself.

But in this again the true temporarily may be as if buried as in a "last resting place". What remains, is a general rational realization with which the thought may be followed in general lines. But the affection no longer is so strong.

Then comes comfort from faith, first, that this truth too objectively remains of strength with the Lord, second that for this reason the former affection has not perished, but has been drawn into the internal, there to feed the remains. And thence man draws effective strength to combat in this obscure state.

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All things were made by the Word, and without Him was not any thing made that was made, JOHN I : 3. When the individual man of the Church begins to gain an ever more richly varied consciousness of the internal sense of the Word, then at the same time a light rises for him over the internal sense of his own life and human life in general. Without the Word as absolute object the sense of his life can never become clear to him. The light of the Word continues to shine, but he is then the darkness that does not grasp the light. At the Coming they who believed in the Lord could obtain counsel from Him personally and He could speak words that are Spirit and Life. After His

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Glorification, and much more so with His Second Coming, the intercourse of the Lord with man passes through the intermediary way of the written Word. Only when the words here too begin to speak and find in us a tremulous sounding-board, they begin to reveal the purpose and sense of our most personal lives. If not, man remains a stranger to the life given him from the Lord, he rubs along it, he takes hold of the wrong thing, he knocks and bruises himself against it - he perishes or else the resistance of the proprium makes him too as hard as the apparently hard objects. This the Greek philosopher Herakleitos knew, when he wrote down these terrifying words: "That with which they are most continuously in touch, with the Word which dwells through all things, with that they are at variance, and the things they daily knock up against appear strange to them". Only when man learns to understand the Word, his life begins to belong to him. The light of the Word is then for him the light of an inviolably pure and elevated object, which wherever he turns and unseen by others, he has ever before his eyes, as the Angels see their Sun. This highest centre, to start with, is the single object from which the Love and Wisdom from the Lord go forth conjoined. For this reason also it is the sole thing which is able essentially to enlighten and warm the daily things, occurrences, and coincidences, so that their poor obtrusive hard materiality powders to dust, and their internal sense flourishes up as a tender plant deserving to be cherished; their internal sense, that is what they signify for us. For, just as the letter of the Word, things and persons are signs of an internal which is hidden behind them. They are also the mirrors of what the Lord's Providence intends and purposes with us. And so too of what we may be for others in genuine charity.

H. M. Haverman.

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The Divine Truth revealed by the Lord to men on earth is a constant source of happiness. For the Revelation is a constant source of truth for all ages to come, and the affection for truth leads men to constant endeavour to see more of truths contained in this inexhaustible source.

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Each new truth, or aspect of truth, a lover of truth finds, brings happiness to him.

A lover of truth can never stop searching for truth satisfied with what he has found. The happiness truth brings lies in the searching for it as well as in the finding of it.

This happiness may consist mostly in intellectual enjoyment of the search and the satisfaction in finding. The real and lasting happiness that truths from the Lord bring comes to the lover of truth when he makes the truths he sees a standard of life which he should follow.

The finding of a new truth may at times bring sadness by showing some evil in us that we had not seen before. The struggle against this evil and the victory over it by the Lord's power brings the happiness of Heaven and renewed ability to find more truth.

Albert Bjorck.   

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THE NEW WILL AND NEW UNDERSTANDING WHICH ARE THE LORD'S WITH MAN

By THE REV. THEODORE PITCAIRN.

One of the main uses of DE HEMELSCHE LEER has been to make clear the distinction between the Word and Doctrine out of the Word. The Word as it is in itself, or, what is the same, the Word as seen by the Lord, is the Divine Doctrine itself, the Divine above the Heavens, the Esse of the Divine Doctrine, while the genuine Doctrine out of the Word is the Divine Doctrine in the Heavens and the Church, which is called "the Divine a se", or "the Divine from itself"; this is the Existere of the Divine Doctrine.

We read in NINE QUESTIONS I: "The Son of Man in the spiritual sense signifies the truth of the Church out of the Word". And in the CANONS: "That to him who speaks a word against the Son of Man it is remitted, is because [it is remitted] to him who denies this and that to be Divine Truth out of the Word in the Church, if only he believes that in the Word and out of the Word are Divine Truths. The Son of Man is the Divine Truth out of the Word in the Church, and this cannot be seen by all", Holy Spirit V : 9.

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All who acknowledge the Writings of Swedenborg as the Word of the Lord, can see that the Truths of the New Church are primarily out of this Newest Testament given by means of Swedenborg, and yet strangely it is denied that the Truths of the Church are Divine. To deny the Divinity of the Truths of the Church out of the Word is to deny the Son of Man. It is to be noted that to speak a word against the Son of Man may be forgiven, provided one "believes that in the Word and out of the Word are Divine Truths". It is now commonly believed that in the Word are Divine 'Truths, but it is not believed that "out of the Word in the Church are Divine Truths". Divine Truths out of the Word in the Church are called: the Doctrine of genuine Truth, also the Doctrine of Divine Truth, for we read, “No one can see the spiritual sense except out of the Doctrine of genuine Truth. '" It is not allowed to anyone in the natural world, nor in the spiritual world, to investigate the spiritual sense of the Word out of the sense of the letter of it, unless he is entirely in the Doctrine of Divine Truth, and in enlightenment from the Lord; wherefore out of the Doctrine of Divine Truth confirmed out of the sense of the letter of the Word, the spiritual sense can be seen", CONCERNING THE SACRED SCRIPTURE FROM EXPERIENCE XXI. Thus the Word teaches that Doctrine out of the Word is Divine, for we read further: "Divine Doctrine is the Word in the internal sense… ; Divine Doctrine is also the Word in the literal sense ... ; also the Doctrine thence is Divine", A.C. 3712. Hence it follows that if the teaching of the Word that "in the Church out of the Word are Divine Truths", and that "one must be entirely in the Doctrine of Divine Truth", and that "the Word and also Doctrine thence are Divine" be denied, it involves a denial of the Word in which this teaching is given.

It is commonly said that all good and truth are from the Lord, this is an acknowledgment of the Holy Spirit; but it is said that the truths in the Church out of the Word are not Divine, this is a denial of the Son of Man. The essential falsity of this position lies in the fact that it is believed that good and truth are received in man's own will and understanding.

We read in the ARCANA CELESTIA as follows: "With no

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man is there any Understanding of truth or Will of good …; but when they become celestial, there appears as if there were a Will of good and an Understanding of truth, but it is the Lord's alone", n. 633. Again: "The new will, which is of charity, ... is not man's, but the Lord's with the man; and this, because it is the Lord's, must never be commingled with the things of man's will", n. 1001. "Through regeneration man receives a new will; but the will which he receives through regeneration is not man's, but the Lord's with the man", n. 10035. "The regenerate spiritual man receives the Divine Good in the new will, and the Divine Truth in the new understanding", n. 3394.

The statement that the Doctrine of the Church is not man's own understanding but the understanding which is the Lord's with man, was called, in the ministers' meetings 1933, ridiculous.

From the above it is evident that the saying that DE HEMELSCHE LEER makes man Divine is a misrepresentation, and is in fact entirely untrue, for DE HEMELSCHE LEER has never said that anything which is of man is Divine, but only that which is the Lord's with man.

Human good would be good received in man's will, and human truth would be truth received in man's understanding, instead of in the will and understanding which are the Lord's with man. That such good does not exist is taught as follows: "All good is Divine with man, because it is from the Divine", A.C. 10618; and that such truth does not exist is taught as follows: "Every truth which is a truth is Divine", A.E. 34. But in spite of the teaching of the Word men wish to receive good in their own will, and truth in their own understanding, that is to love and believe from themselves, thus to have human goods and truths.

Concerning this wish we read in the ARCANA CELESTIA as follows: "The Angels themselves in respect to the proprium of them do not make Heaven; but in respect to the Divine which they receive from the Lord .... Each one of them there acknowledges, believes, and also perceives, that nothing of good is from themselves, but from the Lord .... From this it can be seen how it is to be understood that the Lord is the all in all of Heaven; also that the Lord dwells there in His Own [that is, in the will and under­standing which are His] ; and likewise that by an Angel in

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the Word is signified something of the Lord .... Similarly it is with the Church. In respect to what is the proprium of them [their own will and understanding], the men there do not make the Church, but in respect to the Divine which they receive from the Lord; for every one there who does not acknowledge and believe that all the good of love and truth of faith is from God, is not of the Church; for he wills to love God from himself [from his own will] and to believe in God from himself [from his own understanding], which however no one can do .... The Church is the Lord's Heaven on earth, consequently the Lord in the Church is also the all in all, as in Heaven, and He there dwells in His Own [the will and understanding which are His] with men, as with the Angels in Heaven", n. 10151. "The Lord is present with the Angels of Heaven and with the men of the Church not in the proprium of them, but in His Own [the will and understanding which are His] with them, thus in the Divine", n. 10157. Everywhere in the Word it is taught that the genuine Doctrine from the Word in the Church is Divine. The teaching that such Doctrine is not Divine is not from the Word, but from the wishes or the will of men.

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EXTRACTS FROM THE ISSUE FOR JULY-AUG. 1936

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NEW THINGS

BY ANTON ZELLING.

With those who are in celestial love, the Divine Fire or the Divine Love is continually creating and renewing the interiors of the will.

ARCANA COELESTIA 9434.       

The new will is entirely the Lord's. The new understanding is entirely the Lord's. Every Doctrine of the genuine True is entirely of the new will and understanding. That this is so, is already entirely involved in the dutch word for genuine echt, for echt is related to the conjugial, as in the Latin the word genuinus of Doctrina genuini Veri is related to to generate. It is not the caterpillar that mates but the butterfly. "The conjunction of the true and the good is regeneration", A.C. 10022. Thus the genuine True is not except with the regenerated man, whose will and understanding are new, that is, purely the Lord's.

NEW, THAT IS, PURELY THE LORD'S. - A scent of glorification begins to ascend from the word "new"; for every Doctrine of the genuine True which is an understanding of the Word, is at the same time an understanding of the language, which thus re-becomes what in essence it was, is, and will be out of the Lord's Divine Providence: entirely of the Word. The word "new" now begins from the self -evident reason of love again to raise itself and to turn to the spiritual Sun. A heliotrope. The kingdom of words corresponds to the vegetable kingdom in a phenomenon of spiritual origin, which by botanists is called heliotropism, a systematically turning itself to the sun. In the warmth and the light of the Doctrine out of the Word according to the measure in which they are more and more vernally conjoined - once again: the conjunction of the true and the good is regeneration - the words begin to bud as flowers, heliotropically or universally, that is, turned to the One, literally One-ward. As man in the open field or on the

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