8. The second state is when a distinction is made between the things that are the Lord's and those that are man's own. Those which are the Lord's are called in the Word 'remnants', and here they are chiefly the cognitions of faith which a person has learned since he was a small child. These are stored away and do not come out into the open until he reaches this state. Nowadays this state rarely occurs without temptation, misfortune, and sorrow, which lead to the inactivity and so to speak the death of bodily and worldly concerns - the things which are man's own. In this way what belongs to the external man is segregated from what belongs to the internal. Within the internal are the remnants, stored away by the Lord until this time and for this purpose.

1862. 'Which passed between the pieces' means that it divided off those who belonged to the Church from the Lord. This becomes clear from what has been stated above at verse 10 about the separation of the animals down the middle meaning parallelism and correspondence as regards celestial things, and about each part being laid opposite the other meaning the Church and the Lord, and about the space or interval in between meaning that which lies between the Lord and the Church, or the Lord and the member of the Church, namely a conscience in which goods and truths have been implanted by means of charity. When hatred has taken the place of charity, and evils and falsities the place of goods and truths, no conscience for what is good and true exists. Instead this space or interval in between appears as something filled up with a smoking furnace and a burning torch, that is, filled up with persuasions of falsity and with hatred, which are what separate the Lord completely from the Church. These are the things meant by 'it passed between those pieces', especially the flaming torch which is self-love, or what amounts to the same, the evil that is the product of hatred. This becomes clear also in Jeremiah where almost the same words occur,

I will make the men (vir) who transgressed My covenant and who did not keep the terms of the covenant which they made before Me like the calf which they cut in two and passed between its parts. The princes of Judah, and the princes of Jerusalem, the eunuchs and the priests, and all the people of the land who passed between the parts of the calf, and I will give them into the hand of their enemies and into the hand of those who seek their souls, and their dead bodies will be food for the birds of the air ¹ and the beasts of the earth. Jeremiah 34:14, ² 18-20.

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