758. 18:3 "For all nations have drunk of the wine of the wrath of her licentiousness, and the kings of the earth have committed whoredom with her." This symbolically means that Roman Catholics have produced nefarious dogmas, dogmas that are adulterations and profanations of the Word's goodness and truth, and have imbued with them all those born and brought up in the kingdoms under their domination.

That this is the symbolic meaning of these words can be seen from the explanations in nos. 631, 632 and 720, 721 above, where similar imagery occurs, and we have no need to add more, except to say that similar statements regarding Babel are made in Jeremiah:

Babylon was a golden cup in Jehovah's hand, that made all the earth drunk. The nations drank of her wine; therefore they are deranged. (Jeremiah 51:7)

And:

Babylon shall become... a hissing... When they are inflamed I will lay their feasts; I will make them drunk, that they may rejoice, and sleep a perpetual sleep and not awake. (Jeremiah 51:37, 39)

The wine that they drink that makes them drunk symbolizes their dogmas, and how nefarious these are may be seen in no. 753 above. One of those dogmas is this nefarious one, that the works people do in conformity with their tenets earn merits, by causing the Lord's merit and righteousness to be transcribed into the works and thus into them. And yet every bit of charity, and every bit of faith, or all good and truth, comes from the Lord, and what comes from the Lord continues to be the Lord's in its recipients. For what comes from the Lord is Divine, which can never become a person's own.

Something Divine can be present in a person, but not in his native self, for a person's native self is nothing but evil. Therefore someone who claims for himself something Divine as his own, not only defiles it, but also profanes it. Something Divine from the Lord is kept carefully separate from a person's native self, being elevated above it and never immersed in it.

But because Roman Catholics have transferred all the Lord's Divinity to themselves, and so have appropriated it as their own, it flows like rainwater mixed with pitch, from a fountain of tar.

The case is the same with the dogma that justification is real sanctification, and that their saints are holy in themselves, even though the Lord alone is holy (Revelation 15:4).

For more on the subject of merit, see The New Jerusalem and its Heavenly Doctrine (London, 1758), nos. 150-158! Could not find a match for this book: nos. .

6438. From these things foretold by Israel regarding Joseph it may again be seen that every detail contains an inner meaning and that without that meaning scarcely anything is intelligible. The person who fixes his attention solely on the literal meaning may think that these things which were stated regarding Joseph were going to happen to his descendants from Manasseh and Ephraim, because in verse 1 Israel says that he was going to tell them what would happen to them at the end of days. But in the historical accounts concerning those descendants in the Books of Moses, Joshua, Judges, Samuel, or Kings, one does not find anything of the sort happening to them. They were no more greatly blessed than any other tribe; rather, like all the others they were taken away into captivity and scattered among the nations. From all this it is evident that the real meaning is not what presents itself in the sense of the letter but something else contained in the internal sense. Furthermore without the internal sense one cannot begin to know what all the things said about Joseph imply, namely these:

The son of a fertile one is Joseph, of a fertile one beside a spring; daughters, each one of whom marches onto the wall.

They exasperate him and shoot at him and hate him, do the archers.

He will sit in the strength of his bow, and the arms of his hands will be made strong by the hands of the powerful Jacob; from there is the shepherd, the stone of Israel.

The blessings of his father will prevail over the blessings of his ancestors, even as far as the desire of the everlasting hills.

They will be on the head of Joseph and on the crown of the head of the Nazirite among his brothers.

Every single one of these statements is of such a nature that no one can ever know what it really means except from the internal sense.