232. 4. This is why the Lord does not grant us inner access to the truths that wisdom discloses and the good that love does except as we can be kept in them to the end of our life. I need to proceed with particular care in explaining this for two reasons: first because it is vital to our salvation, and second because an appreciation of this principle is key to appreciating the laws of permission that will be dealt with in the next section [234-274]. It is vital to our salvation because, as already noted [226-227], if we first accept the divine contents of the Word and therefore of the church but then backslide from them, we profane what is holy in the most harmful way. To uncover this secret of divine providence so that rational people can see it in their own light, then, it will be laid out in the following sequence. (a) At our deeper levels, good and evil cannot coexist within us, so neither can malicious distortion and beneficent truth. (b) The Lord can bring into our deeper levels what is good and the truth that comes from it only to the extent that evil and its distortions have been banished. (c) If what is good and its truth were brought in before evil and its distortions were removed, or to a greater extent than they were removed, then we would backslide from the goodness and return to our evil. (d) When we are absorbed in evil, much that is true can be introduced into our minds and stored in our memory without being profaned. (e) The Lord in his divine providence, however, takes the greatest care that we do not accept it into our volition before we have, in our apparent autonomy, banished evils from our outer self, or do not accept it to a greater extent than we have banished our outer evils. (f) If this were done too early or too fully, then our volition would adulterate the goodness and our discernment would falsify the truth by mingling them with what is evil and with what is false. (g) This is why the Lord does not grant us the truths that wisdom discloses and the good that love does except as we can be enabled to keep them to the end of our life.

234. Laws of Permission Are Also Laws of Divine Providence

There are no "laws of permission" that are simply that, or that are separate from the laws of divine providence. They are the same thing; so saying that God allows something to happen does not mean that he wants it to happen but that he cannot prevent it because of his goal, which is our salvation. Whatever happens for the sake of this goal, our salvation, is in accord with the laws of divine providence, since as already noted [183, 211], divine providence is always moving away from and contrary to our own intentions. It is constantly focused on its goal; so at every moment of its work, at every single step of its course, when it notices that we are straying from that goal it leads and turns and adapts us in accord with its laws, leading us away from evil and toward good. We will see shortly that this cannot be accomplished without allowing bad things to happen.

Further, nothing can be allowed to happen without some cause, and causes are to be found only in some law of divine providence, a law that tells us why something is allowed to happen.