758. 18:3 "For all nations have drunk of the wine of the wrath of her licentiousness, and the kings of the earth have committed whoredom with her." This symbolically means that Roman Catholics have produced nefarious dogmas, dogmas that are adulterations and profanations of the Word's goodness and truth, and have imbued with them all those born and brought up in the kingdoms under their domination.

That this is the symbolic meaning of these words can be seen from the explanations in nos. 631, 632 and 720, 721 above, where similar imagery occurs, and we have no need to add more, except to say that similar statements regarding Babel are made in Jeremiah:

Babylon was a golden cup in Jehovah's hand, that made all the earth drunk. The nations drank of her wine; therefore they are deranged. (Jeremiah 51:7)

And:

Babylon shall become... a hissing... When they are inflamed I will lay their feasts; I will make them drunk, that they may rejoice, and sleep a perpetual sleep and not awake. (Jeremiah 51:37, 39)

The wine that they drink that makes them drunk symbolizes their dogmas, and how nefarious these are may be seen in no. 753 above. One of those dogmas is this nefarious one, that the works people do in conformity with their tenets earn merits, by causing the Lord's merit and righteousness to be transcribed into the works and thus into them. And yet every bit of charity, and every bit of faith, or all good and truth, comes from the Lord, and what comes from the Lord continues to be the Lord's in its recipients. For what comes from the Lord is Divine, which can never become a person's own.

Something Divine can be present in a person, but not in his native self, for a person's native self is nothing but evil. Therefore someone who claims for himself something Divine as his own, not only defiles it, but also profanes it. Something Divine from the Lord is kept carefully separate from a person's native self, being elevated above it and never immersed in it.

But because Roman Catholics have transferred all the Lord's Divinity to themselves, and so have appropriated it as their own, it flows like rainwater mixed with pitch, from a fountain of tar.

The case is the same with the dogma that justification is real sanctification, and that their saints are holy in themselves, even though the Lord alone is holy (Revelation 15:4).

For more on the subject of merit, see The New Jerusalem and its Heavenly Doctrine (London, 1758), nos. 150-158! Could not find a match for this book: nos. .

149. Freedom comes from the equilibrium between heaven and hell; if we did not have this freedom we could not be reformed. This has been shown in Heaven and Hell; see the discussion of the equilibrium itself in §§589-596 and of the freedom that arises from it in §§597-603. To provide information here about what freedom is and about the fact that it makes our reformation possible, I would like to quote the following from that source. ¹

I have just described the balance between heaven and hell and have shown that the balance is between goodness from heaven and evil from hell, which means that it is a spiritual balance that in essence is a freedom.

The reason this spiritual balance is essentially a freedom is that it exists between what is good and what is evil and between what is true and what is false, and these are spiritual realities. So freedom is the ability to intend either good or evil and to think either truth or falsity, the ability to choose one instead of the other.

The Lord grants this freedom to every individual, and it is never taken away. By virtue of its source it in fact belongs to the Lord and not to us, because it comes from the Lord; yet still it is given to us along with our life as though it were ours. This is so that we can be reformed and saved, for without freedom there can be no reformation or salvation.

Anyone who uses a little rational insight can see that we have a freedom to think thoughts that are good or evil, honest or dishonest, fair or unfair, and that we can say and do things that are good, honest, and fair, although we cannot say and do things that are evil, dishonest, and unfair, because of the moral and civil laws that keep our outward nature in restraint.

We can see from this that this freedom applies to our spirit, which does our thinking and intending, but not to our outer nature, which does our talking and acting, unless our outer nature is following the aforementioned laws.

The reason we cannot be reformed unless we have some freedom is that we are born with evils of all kinds, evils that need to be laid aside if we are to be saved. Yet they cannot be laid aside unless we see them within ourselves, admit that they are there, then no longer will them, and ultimately reject them. Only then are they laid aside. This cannot happen unless we are exposed to both what is good and what is evil, since it is from goodness that we can see evil, though from evil we cannot see goodness. As for the kinds of spiritual goodness we can think about, from early childhood we learn them from the reading of the Word and from sermons. We learn the kinds of moral and civic goodness from our life in the world. This is the primary reason we need to be in a state of freedom.

The second reason we cannot be reformed without freedom is that nothing becomes part of us unless we engage with it with love. True, other things can enter us, but no deeper than into our thought, not into our will; and anything that does not enter all the way into our will is not ours. This is because our thinking is derived from our memory, but our will is derived from our life itself. We never experience a sense of freedom unless our feelings, which are extensions of what we love, are engaged, because whatever we intend or love, we do with a sense of freedom. This is why our freedom and the feelings we have from our love or our will are one and the same. So we also have freedom in order to be able to be moved by what is true and good, or to love them, so that they become like part of us. In a word, anything that does not enter us while we are in a state of freedom does not stay with us because it does not belong to our love or will; and anything that does not belong to our love or will does not belong to our spirit. The reality underlying our spirit is love or will.

So that we can be in a state of freedom for the sake of our reformation, we are joined in spirit to heaven and to hell. With each of us there are spirits from hell and angels from heaven. By means of the spirits from hell we encounter our evil, while by means of the angels from heaven we encounter the good we have from the Lord. As a result, we are in a spiritual equilibrium-that is, a state of freedom. On the fact that angels from heaven and spirits from hell are present with all of us, see the chapter on the union of heaven with the human race (Heaven and Hell 291-302).

फुटनोट: