Page:A Compendium of the Theological Writings of Emanuel Swedenborg.djvu/558

462 angelic heaven therefrom; and because this use was the end of ends of the creation, it follows that all the states of blessedness, happiness, gladness, gratification, and pleasure, which could ever be conferred on man by the Lord the Creator, are gathered into this his love. That delights follow use, and are experienced by man according to the love of the use, is manifest from the delights of the five senses,—sight, hearing, smell, taste, and touch; each of these has its delights differing according to their specific uses. What then must be the delight of the sense of conjugial love, whose use is the complex of all other uses?

I know that few will acknowledge that all joys and all delights from first to last are gathered into conjugial love; because love that is truly conjugial, into which they are gathered, is at this day so rare that it is unknown what it is, and scarcely that it exists. For these joys and delights are in no other than genuine conjugial love; and as this is so rare on earth it is impossible to describe its super-eminent felicities otherwise than from the mouth of angels, for they are in it. They have declared that its inmost delights, which are of the soul,—into which the conjugial [influence] of love and wisdom or good and truth from the Lord first flows,—are imperceptible and therefore ineffable, because they are delights at the same time of peace and innocence; but that in their descent they become more and more perceptible,—in the higher [regions] of the mind as states of blessedness, in the lower as states of happiness, in the breast as delights therefrom; and that from the breast they diffuse themselves into each and every part of the body, and finally unite in ultimates in the delight of delights. And the angels have related wonders respecting these delights, declaring also that the varieties of them in the souls of consorts, and from these in their minds, and from these in their breasts, are both infinite and eternal; and that they are exalted according to the wisdom in the husbands,—and this because they live to eternity in the flower of their age; and because to them nothing is more blessed than to grow wiser and wiser, (ib. n. 68,69.)

The amount and the quality of intelligence and wisdom that a man has is according to the amount and quality of conjugial love with him. The reason is that conjugial love descends from the love of good and truth, as an effect from its cause, or as the natural from its spiritual; and all intelligence and wisdom are from the marriage of good and truth, even with the angels of the