19. I will mention some marvellous things, which yet are not marvellous in heaven; these are:

(1) That the natural world could not exist except from the spiritual world; nor, consequently, subsist, inasmuch as subsistence is perpetual existence.

[2] (2) That the Church is not possible with man, unless its internal be spiritual and its external natural: there cannot be a Church purely spiritual nor a Church exclusively natural.

[3] (3) Consequently, that no Church, nor anything of the Church, can be raised up with man except there be an angelic heaven, from which its whole spiritual is derived by the Lord and through which it descends.

[4] (4) Since, therefore, the spiritual and the natural thus make one, it follows that the one cannot exist and subsist apart from the other; neither the angelic heaven apart from the Church with man, nor the Church with him apart from the angelic heaven; for, unless the spiritual flow into and terminate in the natural, and rest therein, it is like a prior without a posterior, consequently like an efficient cause without an effect and like an active without a passive-which would be like a bird flying in the air perpetually, without any resting place on the earth, and like the mind of a man perpetually thinking and willing, without any organ, sensory or muscular, in the body, to which it may descend and produce the ideas of its thought, and bring into operation the endeavours of its will.

[5] (5) These things are adduced to the end that it may be perceived, or known, that, as the natural world is not possible without the spiritual world, nor conversely the spiritual world without the natural world, so neither can there be a Church on earth unless there be an angelic heaven through which it may exist and subsist, nor conversely an angelic heaven unless there be a Church on earth.

[6] (6) The angels know this; on which account, they grievously lament when the Church on earth is desolated by falsities and consummated by evils; and, at such times, they compare the state of their life with drowsiness, for then heaven is to them as if its resting-place were taken from beneath it, and like a body deprived of feet; but, when the Church on earth has been restored by the Lord, they compare the state of their life to wakefulness.