Page:A Compendium of the Theological Writings of Emanuel Swedenborg.djvu/125

Rh gradually ceased, and with those who were occupied with direful persuasions and fantasies, it became so changed that they could no longer visibly express any but the most deformed idea of thought; the effect of which was that they could not survive, and therefore became extinct. (A. C. n. 607.)

The image of God and the likeness of God are not destroyed with man, but are as if destroyed; for they remain implanted in his two faculties that are called rationality and liberty. They became as destroyed when man made the receptacle of the Divine love, which is his will, the receptacle of the love of self, and the receptacle of the Divine wisdom, which is his understanding, the receptacle of his own intelligence. Thereby he inverted the image and likeness of God; for he turned away those two receptacles from God, and turned them round to himself Hence it is that they are closed above and open below, or that they are closed before and open behind, when yet by creation they were open before and closed behind; and when they are opened and closed thus inversely, then the receptacle of love or the will receives influx from hell or from its proprium; in like manner the receptacle of wisdom or the understanding. Hence arose in the churches the worship of men in place of the worship of God, and worship from the doctrines of falsity in place of worship from the doctrines of truth; the latter from their own intelligence, and the former from the love of self From these things it is manifest, that religion in process of time decreases and is consummated by the inversion of the image of God with man. (D. P. n, 328.)

As internal respiration ceased, external respiration almost like that of the present day succeeded; and with this came the language of words, or the determination of the ideas of thought into articulate sounds. Thus the state of man became entirely changed, and he became such that he was unable any longer to have that perception enjoyed by the Most Ancient Church. But instead of perception, he had another kind of dictate, which, as it resembled so it may be called conscience, although it was intermediate in nature between perception and the conscience known to some in the present day. When the ideas of thought became thus determined into verbal expressions, the capacity of being