Deuteronomy 7:1

Verse 1. When the Lord your God shall bring you to those heavenly states to which His Providence is leading you that you may be gifted with them, and has cast out many evils from the interiors of your soul—the false religious principles originally in your mind which beget evil, and those derived from hereditary evil; the loves of self and the world, and all your other hereditary evils and the falsities derived from them; the love of external things without internal, and all the falses thence derived, even evil in all its complex, far stronger and more powerful than the soul would be in its unaided strength; [Note.—By the nations in Canaan before the advent of the Israelites are described, according to the New Church writings, those hidden evils which exist hereditarily in depraved human nature and must be driven out during regeneration. In these writings it is abundantly shown that it is natural to every man from hereditary evil to prefer himself to others, and desire to be served by, admired, and even worshiped by others; it is also natural to him to desire all the goods of others, and to take them by force or fraud if it could be done without being found out; and that these evils are deeply hidden under the apparent rectitude and probity which a man has from education, fear of the law, or of the loss of reputation; that still they exist, and if their existence is not known, it is simply an evidence of self-ignorance. (See Arcana Coelestia Index.)]