5464. 'And your words will be verified' means that in this case those truths will be exactly as they have been declared to be. This becomes clear without explanation. For what the brothers, and consequently what the truths known to the Church represented by those brothers, declared themselves to be, see above in 5434-5456. The implications of all this are as follows: People who are interested in the truths known to the Church solely for the sake of material gain can declare, just as well as others do, what the situation is with regard to truths. They can just as well declare, for example, that truths do not become a person's own unless they have been joined to the interior man, and indeed that they cannot be so joined except by means of good, and also that truths do not possess any life until this is done. At times they see these matters and others like them just as well as anyone else does, and sometimes their discernment of them seems even better. Yet this is so only when they talk to other people about such matters. When they talk to themselves about them, thus to their interior man - when, that is, they think about those matters - those who are interested in the truths known to the Church merely for the sake of their own gain contemplate ideas contrary to those truths. But even though they contemplate such contrary ideas and refuse in their hearts to accept those truths, they are still able to convince others that a thing is true, and indeed to do so in the same way as those who really are interested in truths.

[2] The desire to earn material gain, position, and reputation for their own sakes adopts every means that can be employed to convince another; it adopts nothing more readily than such things as are essentially true since these have the power hidden within them to attract people's minds. Everyone - no matter who, provided that he is not mentally deficient - is endowed with such an ability, that is to say, the ability to understand whether things are true. He has been endowed with it to enable him to be reformed and regenerated through the understanding part of his mind. But although, once he has departed into wicked ways and has cast aside altogether what constitutes the faith of the Church, he still possesses the same ability to understand truths, he no longer has any wish to understand them and loathes them the moment he hears them.

5434. 'And they said to him, No, sir, we are upright men' means that truths are indeed present within them. This is clear from the meaning of 'saying to him, No, sir' as a denial that they existed for the sake of gain, meant by Joseph's words 'you are spies', 5432, and a denial that nothing would please them more than to know it for themselves that they are not truths, meant by Joseph's words 'you have come to see the nakedness of the land', 5433; and from the meaning of 'we are upright men' as that truths are indeed present within them, 'uprightness' meaning truth in the internal sense here, as also many times elsewhere in the Word. This meaning - that truths are indeed present within them - follows from the whole train of thought; for in the case of people who have acquired to themselves the truths known to the Church, doing so for the sake of their own material gain, those truths are not indeed truths to them, as shown above in 5433. But even so, truths can indeed be present within them, such truths known to the Church as a general whole being meant by 'the sons of Jacob'. The reason 'upright men' means truths quite apart from persons is that in the internal sense everything is withdrawn from ideas about persons; an idea in the literal sense describing a person becomes an idea describing some spiritual reality, see 5225, 5287. The reason for this is that otherwise the reader's thought and consequent speech are inevitably distracted and diverted from that spiritual reality and contemplation of it to details that have to do with the person. What is more, there is no other way in which the thought and consequent speech can become more universal, no other way in which just a number of ideas, let alone ideas that are countless and indescribable, can be taken in simultaneously, as is the case among angels. But although such spiritual images are withdrawn from ideas of persons they still have to do with persons; that is to say, they have to do with people in whom those spiritual realities are present. This is why 'upright men' means truths.