776. Someone who does not know the symbolic meanings of gold, silver, precious stones, pearls, fine linen, purple, silk, scarlet, thyine wood, ¹ ivory vessels, precious wood, bronze, iron, marble, and vessels in general, cannot but wonder that these things are listed, and may think they are simply words piled up to enhance the matter. But it can be seen from our explanations that not one single word is without meaning, and that the words constitute a full description of the fact that those Roman Catholics who have confirmed themselves in the dogmas of that religion possess not one single truth, and if not one single truth, then not one single good that is a good of the church.

[2] I have spoken with Roman Catholics who have confirmed themselves in that religion, even with some who were legates at the Council of Nicaea, ² the Lateran Council, ³ and the Council of Trent, ⁴ and to begin with they believed that what they had decided were pure and sacred truths. After being instructed, however, and being granted then an enlightenment from heaven, they confessed that they did not see one truth. But because they had confirmed themselves in their decrees more than others, following their state of enlightenment - which they themselves extinguished - they returned to their prior faith.

They believed especially that what they had decreed regarding baptism and justification were truths. Yet when they were still in a state of enlightenment, they saw, and from that enlightened sight confessed, that no one derives original sin from Adam, but from the successive generations of his own ancestry, and that this is not taken away in baptism by the imputation and application of the Lord's merit; that an imputation and application of the Lord's merit is a man-made fiction, because it is impossible; and that faith is never infused into any infant at its mother's breast, because faith requires thought.

[3] They saw that baptism is a still a holy sacrament, because it serves as a sign and reminder that a person can be regenerated by the Lord through truths from the Word - as a sign for heaven, and a reminder for the person - and that by baptism a person is introduced into the church, as by crossing the Jordan the children of Israel were introduced into the land of Canaan, and as the inhabitants of Jerusalem were prepared to receive the Lord by the baptism of John. For without that sign in heaven in the sight of angels, the Jews could not have continued and gone on living at the coming of Jehovah, that is, of the Lord in the flesh.

Similar to this was what they had decreed regarding justification.

That no imputation of the Lord's merit occurs or is possible may be seen in The Doctrine of the New Jerusalem Regarding the Lord 18.

Also, that the evil heredity called original sin is derived not from Adam, but from the successive generations of a person's ancestry - this may be seen in Angelic Wisdom Regarding Divine Providence 277. What Adam means in the Word may be seen in no. 241 of that same work.

Poznámky pod čarou:

277a. 1. We are all involved in evil and need to be led away from it in order to be reformed. It is well known in the church that we all have an inherited evil nature and that this is the source of our obsession with many evils. This is also why we can do nothing good on our own. The only kind of good that evil can do is good with evil within it. The inner evil is the fact that we are doing it for selfish reasons, and solely for the sake of appearances.

We know that we get this inherited evil from our parents. Some do say that it comes from Adam and his wife, but this is wrong. We all get it by birth from our parents, who got it from their parents, who got it from theirs. So it is handed down from one to another, growing greater and stronger, piling up, and being inflicted on the offspring. That is why there is nothing sound within us, why everything in us is so evil. Does anyone feel that there is anything wrong with loving oneself more than others? If not, then who knows what evil is, since this is the head of all evils?

[2] We can see from much that is common knowledge in our world that our heredity comes from our parents, grandparents, and great-grandparents. For example, we can tell what household and larger family and even nation people belong to simply from their faces; the face bears the stamp of the spirit, and the spirit is determined by our desires of love. Sometimes the face of an ancestor crops up in a grandchild or great-grandchild. I can tell simply from their faces whether people are Jewish or not, and I can tell what family group others belong to. I have no doubt that others can do the same.

If our desires of love are derived and passed down from our parents in this way, then it follows that their evils are as well, since these are matters of desire.

I need now to state where this similarity comes from.

[3] For all of us, the soul comes from the father and simply puts on a body in the mother. The fact that the soul comes from the father follows not only from what has just been said but also from a number of other indications. One of these is the fact that the baby of a black or Moorish man by a white or European woman will be born black, and the reverse. In particular, the soul dwells in the semen, for this is what brings about impregnation, and this is what the mother clothes with a body. The semen is the elemental form of the father's characteristic love, the form of his dominant love and its immediate derivatives, the deepest desires of that love.

[4] In all of us, these desires are veiled by the decencies of moral life and the virtues that are partly matters of our civic life and partly matters of our spiritual life. These make up the outward form of life even for evil people. We are all born with this outer form of life. That is why little children are so lovable; but as they get older or grow up, they shift from this outer form toward their deeper natures and ultimately to the dominant love of their fathers. If the father was evil, and if this nature is not somehow softened and deflected by teachers, then the child's love becomes just like that of the father.

Still, evil is not uprooted, only set aside, as we shall see below [279]. We can tell, then, that we are all immersed in evil.

277b. No explanation is necessary to see that we need to be led away from our evils in order to be reformed, since if we are given to evil in this world, we will be given to evil after we leave this world. This means that if our evil is not set aside in this world, it cannot be set aside afterwards. The tree lies where it falls; and so too our life retains its basic quality when we die. We are all judged according to our deeds. It is not that these deeds are tallied up but that we return to them and behave the same. Death is a continuation of life, with the difference that then we cannot be reformed.

All our reformation is thorough--that is, it includes both things first and things last. The last things are reformed in this world in harmony with the first ones. They cannot be reformed afterwards, because the outermost things of our lives that we take with us after death become dormant and simply cooperate or act in unison with the inner ones.