102. Angels of heaven have informed me that the ancients had a Word written entirely in correspondences, but that it was later lost; and they have said that this Word is still preserved among them in heaven and is in use among ancients in the particular heaven where the people live who had that Word when they were living in this world.

Some of the ancients among whom that Word is still in use in heaven came from the land of Canaan and its adjoining regions - from Syria, for example; from Mesopotamia, Arabia, Chaldea, Assyria; from Egypt; from Sidon, Tyre, and Nineveh - all regions inhabited by people who were devoted to symbolic worship and therefore to the knowledge of correspondences. Their wisdom in those days was based on that knowledge, and by means of it they had an inner perception and communication with the heavens. The ones who were more deeply knowledgeable about the correspondences of that Word were called “the wise” and “the intelligent, ” though later they were called “diviners” and “magi.”

[2] However, since that Word was full of a kind of correspondence that pointed in a remote way to heavenly and spiritual realities and therefore began to be distorted by too many people, in the course of time, under the Lord’s divine providence, it vanished and eventually was lost; and they were given another Word composed by means of less remote correspondences. This was done through the prophets among the children of Israel.

All the same, that Word kept many of the place-names in Canaan and in surrounding parts of the Middle East with meanings similar to the ones they had in the earlier Word. That is the reason Abram was ordered to go to that land and why his descendants from Jacob on were brought back into it.

4190. 'And Jacob took a stone and erected it as a pillar' means a like truth and worship based on this. This is clear from the meaning of 'a stone' as truth, dealt with in 643, 1298, 3720, and from the meaning of 'a pillar' as worship based on it, that is, on truth, dealt with in 3727, from which paragraphs it is evident that these words mean a like truth and worship based on this. The expression 'a like truth' is used, that is, truth as it exists among gentiles, because although gentiles do not know anything about the Word or as a consequence about the Lord, they still have the same external truths as Christians, such as these: One should worship God with due reverence, keep religious festivals, and honour one's parents; one should not steal, commit adultery, or kill; also, one should not covet what belongs to another. Thus gentiles have the same kind of truths as are included in the Ten Commandments and are also the standards of behaviour set within the Church. The wise among them act in conformity not only with the external but also with the internal form which those same commandments take, for they think that the kinds of things which are forbidden are not only contrary to their religion but also contrary to the common good and so to the internal obligation which they owe to other people, and that as a consequence such actions are contrary to charity. And they think in this way even though they have little knowledge of what faith is. In their obscurity they possess a kind of conscience against which they are unwilling to act, indeed against which some are incapable of acting. From this it becomes clear that the Lord governs their interiors which are in obscurity, and in so doing imparts to them an ability to receive interior truths, which they also do receive in the next life - see what has been shown concerning gentiles in 2589-2604.

[2] I have been allowed to talk on several occasions to Christians in the next life about the state and fortune of gentiles outside the Church - that they accept the truths and goods of faith more easily than do Christians who have not lived according to the Lord's commandments, and that Christians think of gentiles in a heartless fashion. That is to say, they think that all outside the Church stand condemned, a way of thinking based on the established rule that outside the Lord there is no salvation. I have told the Christians to whom I have been speaking that this rule is true, but that gentiles who have led charitable lives with one another and who, moved by some kind of conscience, have done what is just and fair, receive faith and acknowledge the Lord more easily in the next life than those who are inside the Church and have not led charitable lives. I have gone on to say that Christians are subject to falsity when they believe that heaven is theirs alone because they have the Book of the Word, written down on paper but not in their hearts, and also when they know the Lord but do not believe that He is Divine as to His Human, indeed when they do not acknowledge Him, as to His second Essence which they term the human nature, as any more than an ordinary human being. Therefore, left to themselves and their own ideas they do not even adore Him. So it is they themselves who are outside the Lord, and for whom there is no salvation.