47. I. THE FIRST STATE OF THIS CHURCH WAS THE APPEARING OF THE LORD JEHOVIH, ALSO THE CALL AND COVENANTING; AND THEN WAS ITS RISE OR MORNING. We are taught from the Word, that the Lord Jehovih has appeared at the beginning of each of the four Churches of this earth. This is because God is the All-in-all of the Church and of its religion; and the acknowledgment of God in it is like the soul in the body, which causes both its interiors and its exteriors to live; and it is like the prolific element in seed, which, abiding inmostly in all the sap drawn from the earth by the root, accompanies it from the first germination even to the fruit, in which it also is, and disposes the vegetative process so that it proceeds in its proper order. For this reason, the man of the Church, without the acknowledgment of God, is in the eyes of the angels a brute like the wild beasts of the forest, or like a bird of night, or like a monster of the deep; yea, without the acknowledgment of God, man is like a tree whose branches are lopped off, and the trunk cut in pieces, and the whole piled up together in a heap set aside for the fire; for the Lord says,

Apart from Me ye can do nothing; if any one abide not in Me, he is cast forth as a branch, and is withered; and they gather it and cast it into the fire, and it is burned (John 15:5-6).

Without the acknowledgment of God, man, inwardly, as to his rational qualities, is like the ruins of a burned city; he is also like food from which its nutritiveness is boiled out, when it becomes refuse. And so forth.