736. As for Noah, or the member of this new Church, he was such that he believed with simplicity those things which he had come to possess from the Most Ancient Church. These were items of doctrine that had been gathered together and converted into a kind of doctrinal form by those called Enoch. The disposition of the people meant by Noah however was entirely different from those before the Flood who perished, called the Nephilim. For they immersed doctrinal matters concerning faith in their own filthy desires and in this way strove after dreadful persuasions from which they were unwilling to draw back even though they were taught by others and were shown that these were falsities. This dual genius or disposition also exists among people today. The former can be regenerated easily, but the latter with difficulty.

The Bible describes many things as being holy, or sacred. The Ark of the Covenant is one very holy object. The inmost chamber of the tabernacle is called the "Holy of Holies". Things that proceed from the Lord are holy. Objects are holy if they contain something, or represent something, from the Lord. For that reason, the names of the Lord in human languages are holy because they represent qualities of the Lord, things that are Him. The Bible is holy because it contains, interiorly, the Lord's divine truth. The tabernacle of Israel was holy -- not because of the wood or gold or dyed cloth -- but because those things represented qualities that the Lord has. Those same qualities exist, as in an image, in the spiritual states of people who follow the Lord's laws. No person is holy, but if a person's mind contains truth from the Lord and his or her will comes to love the truths and the actions that these truths suggest to him, then his or her mind will contain holy things, because those truths and loves come from the Lord. These things become that person's life and they remain with that person in heaven, after death.

(références: Arcana Coelestia 3997, 4091, 8302)