Page:Immanuel Kant - Dreams of a Spirit-Seer - tr. Emanuel Fedor Goerwitz (1900).djvu/158

 140 of the letter, is altogether different; and that hence the genuine doctrine of the church, which is from the spiritual sense of the Word, teaches otherwise, namely, that God never turns away His face from man and rejects him from Himself, that He does not cast any one into hell and that He is not angry with any one. Every one also whose mind is in a state of illustration when he reads the Word, perceives this to be the case, from the fact that God is good itself, love itself, and mercy itself; and that good itself cannot do evil to any one, also that love itself and mercy itself cannot reject man from itself, because it is contrary to the very essence of mercy and love, thus contrary to the Divine Itself. Wherefore they who think from an enlightened mind when they read the Word, clearly perceive that God never turns Himself away from man, that He deals with him from good, love, and mercy ; that is, that He wills his good, that He loves him, and that He is merciful to him. Hence also they see that the literal sense is spoken in accommodation to the apprehension of man, and according to his first and common ideas."—H. H., 545.

"When things that are contrary to the Divine are treated of in the Word, they cannot be presented otherwise than according to the appearance … for such as man is, so does the Lord appear to him."—Arcana Cælestia, 3425, 3605.

35 (p. 70).—"Now, times which are proper to nature in its world are in the spiritual world pure states, which appear progressive because angels and spirits are finite; from which it may be seen that in God they are not progressive because He is Infinite, and infinite things in Him are one (as has been shown above, n. 17–22). From this it follows that the Divine in all time is apart from time."—D. L. W., 75.

36 (p. 70).—"Because God is a Man, the whole angelic heaven in the aggregate resembles a single man, and is divided into regions and provinces according to the members, viscera, and organs of man. Thus there are societies of heaven which constitute the province of all things of the brain, of all things of the facial organs, and of all things of the viscera of the body; and these provinces are separated from each other, just as those organs are separated in man; moreover, the angels know in what province of man they are. The whole heaven has this resemblance to man, because God is a Man. God is also heaven, because the angels, who constitute