Page:Sermons on the Ten Commandments.djvu/17

 keep His: for, in fact, by a law of the mind, this result will certainly follow. "When man, in keeping the commandments of the Decalogue, thinks of the Lord and heaven,—by such thought and act, his mind (as before explained) becomes conjoined to the Lord and brought into communication with heaven; and then heavenly life flows down from the Lord into his mind; and such life is heaven in the soul, and after death it will expand into all the beauties and glories of heaven itself. Thus keeping the commandments effects conjunction with the Lord, and conjunction with the Lord is heaven and salvation.

We may now see why the two tables on which the commandments were inscribed were called the "tables of the covenant," why the ark in which they were deposited was called the "ark of the covenant," and why, indeed, the whole Word of the Lord is called "the Old and New Covenant," namely, because the Ten Commandments and, indeed, the whole Word, when obeyed, becomes the means of conjunction with the Lord.

The next point to be considered, is the holiness of the Ten Commandments. On this point, the Doctrine of the New Church thus speaks:—"The Commandments of the Decalogue, because they were the first-fruits of the Word, and thence the first-fruits of the Church about to be instituted with the Israelitish nation, and because they were, in a summary, a collection of all things of religion, by which conjunction of God with man and of man with God is effected, therefore they were so holy, that nothing is holier. That they were