Page:Sermons on the Ten Commandments.djvu/65

 were the means of keeping not only that people, but the whole human race, conjoined with heaven. For in consequence of those ceremonies being representative and correspondential, the good spirits and angels present with them (for spirits and angels are ever present with man) perceived the interior things which were signified, and were thereby filled with delight; by which delight they were drawn nearer to the worshiper, and thus threw around him an angelic influence which tended to keep him in connection with heaven, and to protect him from the influences of hell. And, by the law of spiritual communication, the connection with heaven thus established through the ceremonial Jewish Church, influenced more or less powerfully the other peoples of the earth, and thus kept all mankind in a certain degree of conjunction with heaven. We may thus perceive the interior reason for which the Jews were required so strictly to observe the statutes, laws, and commandments enjoined upon them by Jehovah.

Among those ordinances, none was more urgently insisted upon than the observance of the Sabbath: and this on account of its lofty and far-reaching significance. By the Sabbath, in the Jewish Church, was represented, first, the union of the essential Divine and the Divine Human in the Lord, which is the same thing with the Lord's glorification; secondly, it represented the conjunction of the Lord's Divine Human with the heavens, from which conjunction life and light flow into the angels; and thirdly, it represented the heavenly marriage, or the conjunction of