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238 a Divine Sun, the "Sun of righteousness," is ever pouring forth His spiritual heat and light, His love and wisdom, alike on all His creatures: as it is declared, "He maketh His sun to rise on the evil and on the good, and sendeth rain on the just and on the unjust" (for this passage is to be understood spiritually, as well as naturally). But each mind receives that inflowing love and wisdom, according to its own state, according to its own mental structure and organization. The good receive that Divine life, (for the Divine life, as before shown, is love and wisdom) into a mental organisation or form which is correspondent thereto; they receive that love or spiritual heat, and bring it forth again in the delicious fruits of good and benevolent actions; and they reflect that wisdom or spiritual light in the beautiful lights and colours of true, wise, and sparkling thoughts. While, on the other hand, the bad, receiving the same Divine life, or love and wisdom, into perverted or distorted mental forms and organizations, turn light into darkness and good into evil: the truth they distort into error and falsity, and the gentle flame of love they pervert into the furious fire of hate. Thus is the Lord's love turned into hatred—His wisdom into folly. Is God the author, then, of the folly and the hate?—No more than the sun is the source of blackness and of poison: the sun's light is not black, nor its heat poisonous; they are the opposite, being in themselves bright and healthful: but the recipient objects, perverting them, make them such. So God is not evil, nor the author of evil: it is man's distorted mental form, which, perverted from its original order, turns the inflowing life from God, which is in itself love and goodness, into its exact opposite,