178. The faith of any church is like a seed from which all its dogmas grow. It is like the seed of a tree that generates all the tree's features including its fruit. It is like human seed that generates descendants and families one after the other.

If you know a church's primary faith - the one they say is so crucial that it will bring you salvation - then you comprehend the nature of that church.

The following example may illustrate this point: Imagine a faith or belief that says nature created the universe. From that belief come many other beliefs: what we call God is really the universe; nature is its essence; the ether is the highest god the ancients called Jupiter; the air is the goddess the ancients called Juno, the one they made into a spouse for Jupiter; the ocean is a god below the others whom we, like the ancients, could call Neptune; and because nature's divinity extends even to the center of the earth, there is a god there whom we, like the ancients, could call Pluto; the sun is a royal hall for all the gods to meet in when Jupiter calls a council; fire is life from God; birds fly in God, animals walk on God, fish swim in God; thoughts are only modifications in the ether, just as speaking those thoughts involves modulations in the air; and different types of love are just incidental changes in our mental condition caused by the rays of the sun flowing into them. Among these beliefs there is also the view that life after death, heaven, and hell are myths made up by the clergy to win honor and wealth; but although they are myths, they are nevertheless useful and should not be openly ridiculed, because they serve the public by putting simple minds on a leash so that they obey their civic leaders. Still, those who are captivated by religion are unrealistic people, their thoughts are delusions, their actions are amusing, and they are subservient to the clergy in that they believe in things they do not see and see things that lie outside their mental range.

These derivative beliefs and many others like them are contained in the original belief that nature created the universe. They come out when the full implications of that belief are explored.

I have listed all this so you may know that the modern-day church's faith (which in its inner form is a faith in three gods, but in its outer form is a faith in one God) has squadrons of falsities inside it. There are as many falsities to be brought out as there are baby spiders in the egg case produced by a mother spider.

Anyone with a mind made truly rational by light from the Lord sees this. No others are going to see it, though, when the door to that faith and its offspring has been bolted shut by the principle that it is wrong for reason to examine its mysteries.

263. Few people understand how the Lord is the Word. People think that the Lord is able to enlighten and teach us through the Word but that we could not call him the Word on that account.

We need to realize that we are all our own will and our own intellect. This is how one person is differentiated from another. Since the will is a vessel for love and for all the forms of goodness that relate to that love, and the intellect is a vessel for wisdom and for all the forms of truth that relate to that wisdom, it follows that we are all our own love and our own wisdom, or what is the same thing, our own goodness and our own truth. Humans are not human on any other basis; and nothing else in us is human.

In the Lord's case, he is love itself and wisdom itself, and therefore goodness itself and truth itself. He became all this through fulfilling all the goodness and all the truth in the Word. Someone who thinks and speaks only the truth becomes that truth. Someone who intends and does only what is good becomes that goodness. Because the Lord fulfilled all the divine truth and divine goodness that are in the Word - both the truth and goodness in its earthly meaning and the truth and goodness in its spiritual meaning - he became goodness itself and truth itself, and therefore became the Word.