5461. 'One brother among you is to be in bonds in the house of your custody' means that faith in the will must be separated. This is clear from the representation of Simeon - who is the 'one brother who is to be in bonds', named in verse 24 - as faith in the will, dealt with in 3869-3872, 4497, 4502, 4503; and from the meaning of 'being in bonds in the house of custody' as being separated, dealt with in 5083, 5101, 5452, 5456. The implications of this are that when faith in the will - that is, when the will which desires to put the truth of faith into practice - is separated from people with whom the truths known to the Church are present, the link with the Divine is in that case so slender that it is little more than an awareness.

[2] In the case of someone who has been regenerated the Divine flows from the Lord into good, and from this into truth; or what amounts to the same, it flows into his will, and from there into his understanding. To the extent therefore that someone with whom the truths of faith are present receives good from the Lord, the Lord forms for him a new will within the understanding part of his mind (why in the understanding part, see 927, 1023, 1043, 1044, 2256, 4328, 4493, 5113), and the Lord enters in there and creates an affection to do good, that is, to exercise charity towards the neighbour. From this one may see what is meant by the explanation that faith in the will must be separated, which faith is represented by 'Simeon', before the intermediary, which is 'Benjamin', comes to be present.

256. Not only faith but also the Lord Himself is called 'the seed of the woman', because for one thing He alone imparts faith and so is faith itself, and for another He chose to be born, and in particular to be born within a Church which, on account of self-love and love of the world, had sunk completely into a hellish and devilish proprium. He did so in order that from His own Divine Power He might within His own Human Essence unite the Divine Celestial Proprium to the human proprium, so that they became one within Himself. Had He not united them the world would have perished completely. Since the Lord is accordingly 'the Seed of the woman', the seed is called 'He' and not 'it'.