355. Anyone can decide for Divinity on the basis of observations of nature by looking at what we know about bees. Bees know how to collect wax from plants and flowers and how to extract honey, how to build cells like little homes and arrange them in a form like a city, with open spaces for entrance and exit. They scent at a distance the flowers and plants from which they collect wax for their dwellings and honey for their food. Laden with them they fly back to their own territory, to their own hive. In this way, they provide themselves with food and shelter for the coming winter just as though they saw it coming. They appoint a female leader as queen to be the source of their progeny and they build a kind of hall above her, surrounding her with servants; and when the time of birth has arrived, she goes from cell to cell with her retinue of servants and lays her eggs, with the attendant crew sealing the cells to protect them from the air. This provides them with a new generation.
Later, when this generation has reached the age when it can do the same, it is driven out of its home, and once it has been driven out it first gathers itself and then forms a swarm so that its company will not be dispersed, and flies off in search of a home. About autumn, too, the useless drones are taken out and shorn of their wings so that they cannot return and use up food to which they contribute nothing. There is much more, which enables us to conclude that it is for the useful function they perform for the human race and from an inflow from the spiritual world that they have a form of government like ours on earth and even like angels' in heaven. Can anyone furnished with rationality fail to see that things like this do not come from the physical world? What does the sun, the source of nature, have in common with a government that rivals and reflects heavenly government?
On the basis of all this and of other miracles among simple animals, people who acknowledge and worship nature decide for nature, while people who acknowledge and worship God decide for Divinity on the very same basis. That is, a spiritually-minded person sees spiritual forces in these events, and an earthly-minded person sees physical forces in these events. We see [reflections of] our own nature.
As for me, things like this have been testimonies to a spiritual inflow into nature, of the spiritual world into the physical world, an inflow, therefore, from the Lord's divine wisdom. Ask yourself seriously whether you could even think analytically about any form of government, any civil law, any moral virtue, or any spiritual truth unless Divinity were flowing in with its wisdom through the spiritual world. In my own case, I never could and I still cannot. I have actually been constantly watching this inflow perceptibly, tangibly, for nineteen years, so I am saying this on the basis of evidence.
