Page:Arcana Coelestia - Volume I.djvu/23

21—24.] used to denote time, it is also used to denote the state of that time; as in Jeremiah: "Woe unto us, for the day goeth away, for the shadows of the evening are stretched out," (vi. 4.) And again: "If ye can break my covenant of the day, and my covenant of the night, and that there should not be day and night in their season," &c., (xxxiii. 20, also v. 25.) And again : "Renew our days as of old," (Lament. v. 21.)

24. Verse 6. And God said, Let there he an expanse in the midst of the waters, and let it divide between the waters in the waters. After the spirit of God, or the mercy of the Lord, has brought forth into day the knowledges of the true and of the good, and has communicated a perception that the Lord is, that he is the good itself, and the true itself, and that there is no goodness and truth but from Him, he then distinguishes the internal man from the external, consequently the knowledges which are in the internal man, from the scientifics which appertain to the external. The internal man is called an expanse; the knowledges which are in the internal man are called the waters above the expanse; and the scientifics appertaining to the external man are called the waters beneath the expanse. Man, before he is regenerated, does not even know that any internal man exists, much less is he acquainted with its nature and quality. Being occupied with corporeal and worldly things in which also the faculties of his internal man are immersed, he cannot conceive of any difference between this and his external, and thus he forms a confused and obscure something, from two perfectly distinct existences. It is on this account that it is first said, "Let there be an expanse in the midst of the waters," and further, "Let it divide between the waters in the waters," but not "Let it divide between the waters which are under the expanse and the waters which are above the expanse," as it is afterwards said in the next verses: "And God made the expanse, and divided between the waters which were under the expanse, and the waters which were above the expanse, and it was so. And God called the expanse heaven," (verse's 7, 8.) The next thing therefore which man observes in the course of regeneration, is, that he begins to know that there is an internal man, or that the things which are in the internal man are goods and truths, which are of the Lord alone. Now as the external man, when he is being regenerated, is of such a nature that he still supposes the goods which he does to be done of himself, and the truths which he speaks to be spoken of himself, and whereas, being such, he is led by them of the Lord, as by things of his own, to do good and to speak truth, therefore mention is first made of a division of the waters under the expanse, and afterwards of those above the expanse. It is also an arcanum of heaven, that man, by things of his own, as well the fallacies of the senses as the natural appetites, is led and inclined of the