4377. 'And he said to him, My lord knows that the children are tender' means truths which have not yet acquired Divine life. This is clear from the meaning of 'children' or sons as truths, dealt with in 489, 491, 533, 1147, 2623, 3373, and from the meaning of 'tender ones' as truths that are recent and so those which have acquired some life but not as yet genuine life, in this case Divine Life since the subject is the glorification of the Lord's Divine Natural. These matters can be illustrated by means of what happens to a person who is being regenerated, for the regeneration of man is a model of the glorification of the Lord. A person who is being regenerated passes through different phases, akin to those which follow birth - phases akin to infancy, childhood, adolescence or youth, and adult years. Indeed a person who is being regenerated is born anew. During the phase when he is an infant the truths he knows do indeed possess life, though not as yet spiritual life. At this stage they are merely general truths which lack particular and specific ones, yet to which good is being joined. That joining of truths to good is therefore purely exterior, not interior. A more interior joining together of them is effected step by step as he advances into the phases that follow infancy. It is the state belonging to this type of infancy that is meant by the reference to the children being tender and by what is said immediately after that - 'and the flocks and herds with me are suckling, and if the men overdrive them for one day, all the flocks will die'.

533. Since nothing further is mentioned about Lamech apart from the fact that be beget sons and daughters, who are the conceptions and births of such a Church, there is no need to pause any longer over him. What these births, or sons and daughters, were, becomes clear from the Church, for the character of a Church determines that of its offspring. Both those Churches called Methuselah and Lamech breathed their last just before the flood.