1. THE PRECEPTS OF THE DECALOGUE

Article I.

After the Last Judgment Was Executed, a New Church Was Promised, Which Is Meant in the Book Of Revelation by the New Jerusalem

1. Explain Revelation 21:1-20. Also Revelation 22:1-5.

2. Show from the Word elsewhere that by Jerusalem is meant the Church, as in the following passages:

Isaiah 1:1; 2:1; 3:8; 5:3; 7:1; 10:10-12, 32; 22:10; 31:5; 33:20; 36:2, 7, 20; 37:10, 32; 40:2; 41:27; 44:26, 28; 52:9; 62:1, 7; 64:10; 65:18; 66:10, 20. 27:13; 30:19, 2:3; 3:1. 4:3; 24:23; 28:14; 31:9; 65:19; 66:13, 5:3; 8:14; 22:21.40:9; 51:17; 52:1-2; 62:6.

"Daughter of Jerusalem": Lamentations 2:13, 15. Micah 4:8. Zephaniah 3:14. Zechariah 9:9.

Jeremiah 1:3, 15; 2:2; 3:17; 4:3, 10-11; 5:1; 6:1; 7:17, 34; 8:5; 9:11; 11:6, 13; 13:9; 14:2, 16; 17:19, 21, 26, 27; 19:7, 13; 22:19; 23:14, 15; 25:8; 26:18; 27:3, 20, 21; 29:2; 32:2, 44; 33:10, 13, 16; 34:19; 35:11; 36:9; 37:5, 12; 38:28; 39:8; 40:1; 44:2, 6, 9, 13, 17, 21; 51:50; 52:12-14. 4:16; 6:6; 34:1, 7; 39:1; 52:4.27:18; 29:25; 34:8; 35:11.24:1; 27:20; 29:1, 2, 4, 20.4:5; 15:4; 34:6; 52:1, 3.4:4; 8:1; 11:2, 9, 12; 13:13; 17:20, 25; 18:11; 19:3; 25:2; 32:32; 35:13, 17; 42:18, 4:14; 6:8; 52:29; 13:27; 15:5.Lamentations 1:7, 8, 17; 2:10; 4:12.

Ezekiel 4:1, 7; 5:5; 8:3; 9:4, 8; 13:16; 14:22; 16:2-3; 17:12; 21:2, 20, 22; 22:19; 23:4; 33:21; 36:38.24:2; 26:2, 4:16; 12:10, 11:15; 12:19; 15:6.

Daniel 1:1; 6:10; 9:2, 12, 16, 25; 5:2, 3; 9:7.

Joel 3:1, 5-6, 16-17, 20.

Amos 2:5; 1:2.

Obadiah 1:11, 20.

Micah 1:1, 5, 9, 12; 3:10, 12; 4:2.

Zechariah 1:12, 14, 16-17, 19; 2:2, 4, 12; 3:2; 7:7; 8:3-4, 8, 15; 12:2-3, 6; 14:4, 10-11, 17; 12:2, 9; 14:2, 12, 16. 14:8, 14; 9:10. 8:22; 12:6, 11; 14:21. 12:5, 7-8, 10; 13:1.Malachi 3:4; 2:11.

Zephaniah 1:4, 12, 3:16.

Psalms 51:18; 79:1, 3; 122:3, 6; 125:2; 128:5; 137:6, 7; 147:2; 68:29; 135:21. 102:21; 116:19; 122:2; 137:5; 147:12.

3. Some mention of preceding events in the book of Revelation, as concerning the dragon ¹ and the scarlet beast, ² and their destruction. ³

4. The Last Judgment - that it has been described, and needs to be further described.

5. Why a New Church is established following the execution of a Last Judgment.

6. That it is not established before then in order to keep holy things from being profaned.

7. That a promise was given at the time that the spiritual meaning of the Word would be disclosed. Moreover, that the Lord alone is the Word.

8. His Advent then.

9. That heaven has therefore been opened to me.

Article II.

The Church Is Now at an End, and among Few Today Is There Any Religion

1. People do not know regarding the Lord that He alone is the God who rules heaven and earth, thus that He is one God in person and essence, in whom is the Trinity; and yet all religion is founded on a concept of God and on adoration and worship of Him.

2. People do not know that faith is nothing else but truth, and they do not know whether what they call faith is the truth or not. (Excerpt some passages from the little work on the Lord. ⁴ )

Today's faith - say what it is. Also that there are degrees of justification. Whether they are truths may be concluded from the following observations.

If this is faith, there is no need for truths, nor for charity, and not even for any concept of them.

It is not known what charity is.

There is no knowledge of evil and good.

Article III.

Every person is a person after death, and he is then what his love is, and a person's love is the life which awaits everyone after death to eternity.

1. Everyone is examined after death to discover the nature of his love.

2. Every spirit is a form of his affection.

3. The whole of heaven is distinguished into societies in accordance with the varieties of their affections, and the whole of hell into societies in accordance with the varieties of their lusts.

4. Whatever the character of a person's affection, such is the character of his thought.

Article IV.

The devil in, a person resides in the evil qualities of his life, and the Lord in the good qualities of his life

Article V.

To refrain from evils is to do good, and this is the essence of religion

1. Some observations regarding combats and temptations or trials.

2. To refrain from evils is no other than to drive away the devil, and to the degree that a person does this he is conjoined with the Lord and heaven is opened, and for as long as he does not, he is in hell.

Article VI.

A person who refrains from evils because they are sins has faith, and this to the degree of his refraining

Some truths are matters of faith and not of life. To the degree that truths which are matters of life are applied to one's life, to the same degree truths which are matters of faith become truths of one's faith, and the latter not a whit more or less than the former.

List truths of faith which are otherwise matters of knowledge and not faith.

On the prayer of the English before the Holy Supper, ⁵ and on that of the Swedish also, including excerpts from "Obstacles to the Impenitent." ⁶

Therefore there are two tables [of the Decalogue], and they are called a covenant. In the measure that a person carries into practice the one, in the same measure the other is opened.

Article VII.

The Ten Commandments of the Decalogue contain in summary all tenets of religion

1. Many observations regarding the holiness of the Decalogue.

Recapitulation

A recapitulation of the seven articles, with the observation that no one can deny that they are the essence of religion.

Footnotes:

259. 6. Strict materialists justify their rejection of divine providence by noting that there have been many heresies in Christendom and that there still are--those of the Quakers, for example, and the Moravians and the Anabaptists, among many others. The thought may occur that if divine providence were over every least detail and did have as its goal the salvation of everyone, it would have made sure that there was one true religion throughout the whole world, one religion undivided, and certainly not torn apart by heresies. Use your reason, though, and think as deeply as you can. Can we be saved if we are not first reformed? After all, we are born immersed in love for ourselves and the world; and since these loves have within themselves no trace of love for God or love for our neighbor except for selfish reasons, we are also born involved in all kinds of evil. What trace of love or mercy is there in these loves? Does it matter to them if we cheat others, or slander them, or harbor murderous hatred toward them, or seduce their spouses, or torture them in order to get even? Our basic agenda is to be the greatest of all and to take possession of everyone's wealth. This means that we see others as insignificant in comparison to ourselves, as worthless. Can people like this be saved? First they need to be led out of their evils and thereby reformed. I have already offered abundant evidence that that this can be done only within the limits of the many laws of divine providence. For the most part, these laws are unknown even though they are matters of divine love and divine wisdom alike, laws the Lord cannot violate because to do so would be to destroy us rather than to save us.

[2] Review the laws already presented and compare them, and you will see.

Consider, then, that according to these laws there can be no inflow directly from heaven, only indirectly through the Word, through teaching, and through sermons. Add the fact that in order to be divine the Word had to be composed entirely of correspondential imagery. It then follows that disagreements and heresies are inevitable. Permitting them is quite within the laws of divine providence. Not only that, once the church itself has taken matters of intellect alone to be essential to it--matters of belief, that is, and not matters of volition and therefore of life--and once these matters of life are not essential to the church, then our discernment leads us into utter darkness. We wander around like blind people, bumping into everything and falling into pits. It is our volition that must see in our discernment and not our discernment in our volition, which is the same as saying that our life and its love must lead our discernment to think, speak, and act, and not the reverse. If it were the other way around, then a discernment motivated by evil love, actually by diabolical love, would seize on anything our senses offered and demand that our volition do it. This shows where dissent and heresy come from.

[3] However, provision is still made that all of us can be reformed and saved no matter what heresy we may adopt intellectually, as long as we abstain from evils as sins and do not justify our heretical distortions. This is because our volition is reformed by our abstaining from evils as sins, and through our volition our discernment is reformed. Then for the first time it emerges from darkness into light.

There are three essential principles of the church: belief in the divine nature of the Lord, belief in the holiness of the Word, and the life that we call "charity." For each of us, our faith is determined by that life that is charity; our recognition of what that life must be comes from the Word, and reformation and salvation come from the Lord.

If these three principles had functioned as the essential principles of the church, then intellectual dissent would not have divided it. It would only have varied it the way light varies the colors of beautiful things, and the way different gems make up the beauty of a royal crown.