Page:A Compendium of the Theological Writings of Emanuel Swedenborg.djvu/159

Rh redeemed and saved all who suffer themselves to be regenerated, by a life according to the precepts of faith and charity from His Word. By the Lord's blood also in the internal sense, according to which the angels in the heavens perceive the Word, Divine Truth is meant proceeding from the Lord. But how man was saved and redeemed by the Divine, through the subjugation of the hells and the glorification of His Human, no one can know unless He knows that with every man there are angels from heaven, and spirits from hell, and unless these are present with man continually he cannot think anything, or will anything; and that thus as to his interiors man is either under the dominion of spirits who are from hell, or under the dominion of angels from heaven. When this is first known, then it may be known that unless the Lord had entirely subdued the hells, and reduced all things both there and in the heavens to order, no man could have been saved. So, unless the Lord had made His Human Divine, and had thereby acquired to Himself Divine power over the hells and over the heavens to eternity. For without Divine power neither the hells nor the heavens can be kept in order; since the power by which anything exists must be perpetual in order that it may subsist, for subsistence is perpetual existence. The very Divine, which is called the Father, without the Divine Human, which is called the Son, could not effect this; inasmuch as the very Divine without the Divine Human cannot reach to man, nor even to an angel, when the human race have altogether removed themselves from the Divine,—as was the case in the end of times, when there was no longer any faith nor any charity. For this reason the Lord then came into the world and restored all things, and this by virtue of His Human, and thus saved and redeemed man through faith and love to the Lord from the Lord. For those [that have this faith and love] the Lord can withhold from the hells and from eternal damnation; but not those who reject faith and love from Him to Him, for these reject salvation and redemption. (A. C. n. 10, 152.)

At the time of the first coming of the Lord, the hells had increased to such a height that they filled all the world of spirits,—which is intermediate between heaven and hell,—and thus not only disordered the heaven which is called the last or lowest, but also assaulted the middle heaven; which they infested in a thousand ways, and which would have gone to destruction if the Lord had not withstood them. Such an insurrection of the hells is meant by the tower built in the land of Shinar, the head of