908. No one can see or therefore know that everything connected with heaven and the church springs from the goodness of love unless it is demonstrated. It is not known because it is not seen, and the reason is that goodness does not enter a person's thinking as truth does. For truth is seen in thought, because it is illumined by the light of heaven, whereas goodness is only felt, because it exists in response to the warmth of heaven, and when someone reflects on what he is thinking, rarely does he pay attention to what he is feeling, but only to what he sees.

For this reason the learned have attributed everything to thought and not to affection, and the church has attributed everything to faith and not to love, even though the truth that people in the church today call faith or the truth of faith is only a formal expression of the goodness of love, as may be seen in no. 875 above.

Now because a person does not see the goodness in his thinking, inasmuch as goodness, as we said, is only felt, and is felt in the guise of various kinds of delight, and because a person does not pay attention to what he is feeling in his thinking, but only to what he sees in it, therefore he calls good everything that he feels with delight; and he feels evil with delight, because it is inherent in him from birth to do so and emanates from his love of self and the world. That is why people do not know that the goodness of love is everything in heaven and the church, and exists in a person only from the Lord, and why it flows in from the Lord only in someone who refrains from evils and their delights as sins.

[2] This is the meaning of the Lord's declaration that the Law and the Prophets hang on these two commandments: you shall love God above all things, and the neighbor as yourself (Matthew 22:37-40).

Moreover I can assert that a person cannot possess a grain of truth that is in itself true except to the extent that it springs from the goodness of love from the Lord, and so cannot possess a grain of faith that is in itself faith, that is, a living, saving and spiritual faith, except to the extent that it springs from charity from the Lord.

Since the goodness of love is everything in heaven and the church, therefore the whole of heaven and the whole church are set in order in accordance with the affections of people's love, and not in accordance with any of their thinking divorced from those affections. For thought is affection given form, as speech is sound given form.