A church cannot serve two masters. It cannot peacefully coexist with truths and falsities. To want to live with both and to seek a compromise will cause the church to be laid to waste. The church will perish, and the goods and truths of the Word will be taken away from it.

2896. The Word in the Most Ancient Church before the Flood was not a written Word but one revealed to each member of the Church; for they were celestial people and so, like the angels in whose company they lived, knew through perception that which was good and true. Thus they had the Word written on their hearts. For these matters, see 597, 607, 895, 920, 1114-1125. Because they were celestial people and lived in the company of angels, everything they saw and apprehended with any of their senses was to them a representative and a meaningful sign of celestial and spiritual things within the Lord's kingdom; so that they did indeed see worldly and earthly things with their eyes or apprehend them with one or other of their senses; but from and through those things their thoughts were of celestial and spiritual things. In this and no other way they were able to talk to angels, for the things that exist among angels are celestial and spiritual, and when these come down to man they descend into such things as exist with man in the world. The fact that particular objects in the world represent and mean those that exist in heaven has been shown all through from Genesis 1 to here. Such was also the origin of the representatives and meaningful signs, which, when communication with angels started to fade, were gathered together by the people meant by 'Enoch'. See 521, where it is shown that the gathering of those things is meant by the following words,

Enoch walked with God, and he was no more, for God took him. Genesis 5:24.