Page:Sermons on the Ten Commandments.djvu/43

 earth, and there is no other: He is at once the Father and the Son, the Divine and the Human, in one glorified Person. Whoever beholds this Divine Person before his mind's eye, beholds the one true God; whoever looks to any other object than Jesus, and addresses it as God, is addressing a phantasy, a creature of his own imagination, a Being that has no existence,—and consequently he is not worshiping the true God.

This, then, is the sense of the opening words of this Commandment, and it is a sense most important to be understood. We now proceed to consider the spiritual sense of the other portions of the Commandment.

"Thou shalt not have other gods before my face." "These words signify, in the spiritual sense, that truths ought not to be thought of from any other source than from the Lord." The term God signifies distinctively Divine Truth: hence "gods," in the plural, signify Divine truths. In the Psalms, the angels are sometimes termed "gods," simply on the ground that they are recipients of Divine truth.

"It is to be shown," continues the New Church Doctrine, "what is meant by truths which are from another source than from the Lord. They are such truths as have not the Lord in them. The Lord is not in truths with man, in case a man denies Him and his Divinity; nor even though he acknowledges Him, and yet believes that good and truth are not from Him, but from self, and hence claims righteousness