In most places in the Word, "ten" represents "all," or in some cases "many" or "much." The Ten Commandments represent all the guidance we get from the Lord in life; the ten horns on the beast of Revelation represent all power of falsity; the ten virgins with lamps in Matthew 25 represent all people of the church.

Yet in other places, ten, or especially a "tenth," signifies representing remnants, or tiny scraps of goodness preserved for the future. These can be the remnants of a church -- a few good people that can be built up into a new church. Or they can be tiny subconscious memories of love and joy which the Lord stores in each of us in early childhood, feelings He can use later to draw us toward a life of goodness and affection.

These two meanings seem nearly opposite, but they're actually not. Love is whole and indivisible, so that the tiniest feeling buried inside someone contains all the elements of the love it can become. In a similar way, a remnant of a church that has preserved that church's knowledge has everything it needs to grow into a new church. In a sense, then, those remnants are indeed "all," they're just a version of "all" that is still in a state of potential.

5946. 'For your young children and your wives' means for those who as yet have no knowledge - no knowledge of the more internal teachings of the Church. This is clear from the meaning of 'young children' as those who do not as yet have any knowledge of those things; and from the meaning of 'wives' as affections for truth. For when 'men' means truths, as 'the sons of Jacob' do here, 'their wives' means affections for truth; and conversely, when 'men' means forms of good, 'their wives' means truths, though in the latter case the men are called 'husbands', 3236, 4510, 4823. Affections for truth, meant by 'wives' here, have no knowledge of the interior teachings of the Church except through the truths, which are their 'men'. Without truths affections are like the will without the understanding. To see and have knowledge of anything the will must use the understanding, where its sight or eye exists.