6988. 'Or who has made the dumb' means lack of utterance. This is clear from the meaning of 'the dumb' as lack of utterance, for it is used as an antonym of 'mouth', which means utterance, dealt with immediately above in 6987. Utterance is not used here to mean utterance made by the voice, which is speech, for that kind of utterance is natural. Instead utterance is used to mean confession of the Lord and declaration of faith in Him, since this kind of utterance is spiritual. From this it is evident what 'the dumb' means in the internal sense, namely people who, owing to lack of knowledge, are unable to confess the Lord or for that reason declare faith in him. This is the state of gentiles outside the Church and also of the simple within the Church. The fact that these kinds of people are meant by 'the dumb' is evident in Isaiah,

Then will the lame man leap like a hart, and the tongue of the dumb will sing. For waters will break forth in the wilderness, and streams in the plain of the wilderness. Isaiah 35:5-6.

'The tongue of the dumb will sing' stands for the fact that they will confess the Lord and the things that belong to faith in Him. 'Waters will break forth in the wilderness, and streams in the plain of the wilderness' stands for the fact that cognitions of what is true and good will come to them, 'the wilderness' being a state in which cognitions of faith are lacking because they are unknown.

[2] The dumb who were healed by the Lord also mean gentiles who were delivered through His Coming into the world from falsities and consequent evils, such as the one who was 'dumb' in Matthew,

Behold, they brought to Him a dumb man (homo), possessed by a demon; but when the demon had been cast out the dumb [man] spoke. Matthew 9:32, 37.

And another who was 'dumb' in the same gospel,

One was brought to Jesus, possessed by a demon, blind and dumb; and He healed him, so that the blind and dumb [man] both spoke and saw. Matthew 12:22.

The 'dumb' [boy] also possessed by a demon in Mark 9:17-30 has the same meaning.

[3] It should be recognized that the miracles performed by the Lord were all signs indicating the state of the Church and of the human race saved through His Coming into the world; that is to say, when He came those people were delivered from hell who received the faith going with charity. These matters are incorporated in the Lord's miracles. In general all the miracles described in the Old Testament are signs indicating the state of the Church and the Lord's kingdom. There Divine miracles are distinguished from miracles that are devilish or the product of magic, however much the latter, such as the miracles of the magicians in Egypt, seem in outward appearance to be the same as Divine ones.

6987. 'Who makes man's mouth' means utterance. This is clear from the meaning of 'mouth' as voice, dealt with above in 6985; and since it means voice it means utterance. What the specific meaning of 'mouth' is can be recognized only from correspondence. The mouth including the lips corresponds to inward speech that belongs to thought; and a person's thought is active or passive. Active thought is the thought a person engages in when he is speaking and may be called vocal thought; but passive thought is the thought a person engages in when he is not speaking. The nature of the difference between the two becomes clear to anyone who stops to reflect. 'Man's mouth' means active or vocal thought, and so means utterance.

[2] As regards active thought, meant by 'mouth', it should be recognized that such thought is also in its own kind of way a form of speaking, and that through the activity of this speech it activates the physical organs that correspond to it. Verbal expressions are seemingly present in thought, but that is an illusion; solely the meaning embodied in speech is present there. Man can have scarcely any idea of the nature of such meaning, for it is the speech that his spirit possesses, which is a universal kind of speech such as spirits in the next life employ. When this kind of speech passes into corresponding physical organs it gives rise to speech consisting of words, which is exceedingly different from the thought that produces it. That very great difference is plainly evident from the consideration that a person is able to envisage in a minute what will take him a long time to speak or write about. It would be different if that thought consisted of words such as speech in the mouth consists of. By virtue of the correspondence between speech intrinsically within thought and speech uttered by the mouth a person knows how to talk in the universal language as soon as he comes after death among spirits, and so can talk to any spirits, no matter what language they may have spoken in the world; and by the same virtue, as he talks to them there he is scarcely aware that he is not talking the same way he did in the world. Yet the words of which their speech consists are not words such as a person employs when he is in the body. Rather they are the ideas that have composed his thought, and one idea contains very much detail within it. Spirits are therefore able to declare in an instant what man can scarcely express in half an hour; and there is still more contained in the same idea, such as cannot find expression in physical speech.

[3] Yet angels in heaven speak in a different way from spirits. Angels in heaven possess speech consisting of intellectual concepts, which are called immaterial ideas by philosophers, whereas spirits possess speech consisting of mental pictures, which are called material ideas. Consequently one idea belonging to angels' thought contains very much that spirits cannot fully describe even with very many lines of thought, in addition to much that they cannot begin to express. But when a spirit becomes an angel he uses angelic speech, just as a person uses spirits' speech when he becomes a spirit after death, and for a similar reason. From all this one may now see what active thought is - that it is the speech a person's spirit possesses.