Page:Heaven Revealed.djvu/295

 Apocalypse the angel who talked with John, said: "Come hither, and I will show thee the Bride, the Lamb's Wife." (xxi. 9.) And in the next verse we are told who the Bride is—the Holy Jerusalem, the true church of the Lord. "And he carried me away in the spirit to a great and high mountain, and shewed me that great city, the Holy Jerusalem, descending out of heaven from God." And on another occasion the seer heard the voice of a great multitude in heaven, saying: "Let us rejoice and be glad, and give honor to Him; for the marriage of the Lamb is come, and his Bride hath made herself ready." (xix. 7.)

Do not such passages prove that marriage, when mentioned in Scripture, has a spiritual meaning? And that it signifies that conjunction of the Lord with his people, which is elsewhere spoken of as the reciprocal indwelling of the Lord in man and man in the Lord. And this takes place in proportion as we receive from Him love and wisdom, or in the degree that we learn truth, and, through religious obedience to its requirements, cleanse our hearts of all selfish and evil loves; for in that degree our interiors are opened, and we receive an influx of the Lord's life—we appropriate, as it were, the very Divine substance, the Lord's own flesh and blood. Hence He says: "He that eateth my flesh and drinketh my blood, dwelleth in me and I in him." The Lord's flesh is the good of his divine love, and his blood is the truth of his divine wisdom.

As man advances in the regenerate life, truths in his understanding become married to their corresponding goods in the will. And this union of truths with goods