2306. As regards the innocence possessed by young children, because as yet it is devoid of intelligence and wisdom, it is merely a kind of plane for receiving genuine innocence, which they do receive gradually as they become wise. The nature of young children's innocence has been represented to me by something wooden and practically devoid of life, but which is made living as they are perfected by means of cognitions of truth and affections for good. The nature of genuine innocence was afterwards represented by a very beautiful young child, full of life, and naked. For the truly innocent, who dwell in the inmost heaven and so nearest to the Lord, appear before the eyes of other angels as none other than small children, and indeed as naked; for innocence is represented by 'the nakedness of which they are not ashamed', as one reads of the first man and his wife in paradise. In short, the wiser angels are the more innocent they are; and the more innocent they are the more they appear to themselves as young children. This is why in the Word innocence is meant by early childhood. But the state of innocence will in the Lord's Divine mercy be dealt with further on.

Seven, as in Revelation 15:1, signifies everything in an universal sense. The number 'seven' was considered holy, as is well known, because of the six days of creation, and the seventh, which is the celestial self, where peace, rest, and the Sabbath is. The number seven occurs so frequently in the rites of the Jewish church and is held holy everywhere.

So times were divided into seven, longer and shorter intervals, and were called weeks, like the great intervals of times till the coming of the Messiah, in Daniel 9:24-25. The time of seven years is called 'a week' by Laban and Jacob, as in Genesis 29:27-28. So wherever the number seven occurs, it is considered holy and sacred, as in Psalm 119:164, and in Isaiah 30:26.

As the periods of a person's regeneration are distinguished into six, prior to the seventh, or the celestial self, so the times of vastation are also distinguished, until nothing celestial is left. This was represented by the many captivities of the Jews, and by the last Babylonian captivity, which lasted seven decades, or seventy years. This was also represented by Nebuchadnezzar, in Daniel 4:16, 22, 29. It also refers to the vastation of the end times, in Revelation 15:1, 7-8. They should 'tread the holy city under foot, forty and two months, or six times seven,' as in Revelation 11:2 and Revelation 5:1. So the severity and increments of punishment were expressed by the number seven, as in Leviticus 26:18, 21, 24, 28 and Psalm 79:12.

(Odkazy: Apocalypse Explained 5, 7-8, 15; Arcana Coelestia 395; Daniel 9, 9:24, 9:25; Psalms 119)