216. And they sewed together the leaf of the fig tree and made loincloths for themselves.
To sew leaves together is to make excuses. The fig tree is earthly good. To make loincloths for themselves is to feel shame. That is how the people of the earliest church spoke in describing this generation of the church. 1 They were saying that members of this generation had earthly good in place of the earlier innocence, that it hid their evil, and that since they had a merely earthly goodness they felt shame.
Footnotes:
1. The superlative term "earliest church" here might be taken as implying that the earliest people said such things of generations of their church that were later than their own. It is more likely, however, that Swedenborg is using "earliest" here as an umbrella term that includes many generations. Indeed, he seems in discussing the first seven chapters of Genesis to use "earliest church" in two ways: in a strict sense to mean the first, pure state represented by "Adam" (see, for example, §66:1; sometimes referred to as "the very earliest church"); and in a wider sense, as here, to mean the pure state and also all the other spiritual "generations," or stages of descent, down to "the Flood" (see, for example, §231). [JSR]
