250. Readers who pay attention to it can see that the Word has two-part expressions whose elements seem to be repetitions of the same thing. For example, brother and friend, the poor and the needy, wasteland and desert, emptiness and void, enemy and adversary, sin and wickedness, anger and wrath, nations and peoples, joy and gladness, grief and weeping, justice and judgment, and so on. These seem like synonyms when in fact they are not. Brother, the poor, wasteland, [emptiness,] enemy, sin, anger, nations, joy, grief, and justice apply to goodness or, in an opposite sense, to evil. Friend, the needy, desert, void, adversary, wickedness, wrath, peoples, gladness, weeping, and judgment apply to truth or, in an opposite sense, to falsity. Yet it seems to readers who do not know this secret that the poor and the needy, wasteland and desert, emptiness and void, and so on, are the same thing. They are not, in fact, although they combine to form one thing.

In the Word there are also many things that are paired, such as fire and flame, gold and silver, bronze and iron, wood and stone, [bread and water,] bread and wine, purple and fine linen, and so on. Again this is because fire, gold, bronze, wood, bread, and purple apply to goodness, while flame, silver, iron, stone, water, wine, and fine linen apply to truth.

Something similar occurs when the Word says we have to love God with our whole heart and our whole soul, and that God is going to create in us a new heart and a new spirit. "Heart" applies to the goodness of our love, while "soul" and "spirit" apply to the truth of our faith.

There are also words that share in both goodness and truth. They are therefore stated alone without a connection to other terms.

These and many other features, though, stand out only to angels and to people who are aware of both the earthly meaning and the spiritual meaning at the same time.