44. Verses 24-25 And God said, Let the earth bring forth living creatures according to their kinds, beasts and creeping things and wild animals of the earth according to their kinds; and it was so. And God made wild animals of the earth according to their kinds, and beasts according to their kinds, and everything that creeps along the ground according to its kind; and God saw that it was good.

Man, like the earth, can produce nothing good unless the cognitions of faith have already been sown in him enabling him to know what to believe and do. It is the function of the understanding to hear the Word, and of the will to do it. A person who hears the Word and does not do it is one who claims to believe, but he does not live according to it. Such a person separates hearing and doing, and splits his mind in two directions; and by the Lord he is called 'a foolish man',

Everyone who hears My words and does them I liken to a wise man who built his house upon the rock; but everyone who hears My words and does them not I liken to a foolish man who built his house upon the sand. Matthew 7:24, 26.

Matters of the understanding, as has been shown, are meant by 'creeping things which the waters produce', and by 'birds over the earth and over the face ¹ of the expanse'. Matters of the will are here meant by 'living creatures which the earth brings forth', and by 'beasts and creeping things', and also by 'the wild animals of the earth'.

Notes de bas de page:

215. 5. People who are in a state of truly conjugial love continually wish to be one person, but those who are not in a state of conjugial love want to be two separate individuals. Conjugial love in its essence is nothing else but the wish of two to be one, or, in other words, a will on their part that their two lives become one life. To carry out that will is the constant endeavor of this love, and all that it does flows from it. It has been established from the investigations of philosophers, and it is also evident to people of educated reason who reflect, that effort is the very essence of motion, and that will in the human being is a living effort. It follows from this that people who are in a state of truly conjugial love continually have within them an effort, or will, to be one person.

That the opposite is the case with those who are not in a state of conjugial love, they themselves very well know. For they constantly think of themselves as two separate individuals, owing to a lack of union between their souls and minds, and they therefore do not see what is meant by the Lord's words, that "they are no longer two but one flesh" (Matthew 19:6).