775. What is true of the individual as a church is also true of the human collective or aggregate known as the church. The church is a human collective or aggregate that is made up of many individuals; the human individual is the church as it exists within each of the many people who constitute it.

The divine design always includes overall systems and individual components. Everything that exists has both of these elements. Without the overall systems, the individual components would not take shape or be able to sustain continued existence, just as the individual parts of the body could not exist without belonging to some broader system within it. In the human body, the individual parts are the organs and the parts within those organs; connective tissue not only envelops the body as a whole but also wraps and separates the individual organs, and even the parts within them. The same complex structure is found in every animal, bird, and insect. In fact it is also found in every tree, shrub, and seed.

Strings and wind instruments would give no sound at all if there were not some underlying ability to vibrate that they shared in common. That vibration is shaped into the sound of each instrument and the sound of each instrument is in turn shaped into a range of individual notes.

Our entire physical sensitivity is like this, too, in its relationship with our five individual senses of sight, hearing, smell, taste, and touch. The relationship between our entire mental sensitivity and individual mental sensations is similar as well.

[2] These examples have been presented for the sake of illustration. They aim to show that the church as well is divided into grand ages and individual movements over time, and these all together form part of one overall history; each of the four churches, one after the other, formed a part of it. The overall history was shaped by these ecclesiastical epochs; and the epochs were shaped by the general and the individual movements within them.

In the human race, also, there are universal factors - two of them - that shape all the systems and individual parts within us. In our body these two universal factors are our heart and our lungs; in our spirit they are our will and our intellect. All that is alive within us, both on a general and on a particular level, depends on these two physical and these two spiritual factors. Without them, everything within us would fall apart and die.

The same thing would happen to the entire angelic heaven and the whole human race - in fact, all of creation - if all that existed within them both collectively and individually were not dependent on God, on his love and wisdom.