Page:Swedenborg's Doctrine of Correspondence.djvu/111

Rh as beween any living creation and its artificial imitation. There is the continual influx and presence of a Divine vital force into the language of the written "Word, analogous to the force of living things in nature; the indwelling, sustaining and operating presence of the eternal mind that creates it. And this is the meaning of that divine definition of revelation, "The words that I speak unto you they are spirit and they are life." Swedenborg says:

"I have been informed how the Lord spoke with the prophets through whom the Word was given. He did not speak with them as with the ancients, by an influx into their interiors, but by spirits who were sent to them, whom the Lord filled with His presence and thus inspired words which they dictated to the prophets; so that it was not influx but dictation. And because the words came forth immediately from the Lord, they were each filled with the Divine, and contain within an internal sense, which is such that the angels of heaven perceive them in a heavenly and spiritual sense, when men perceive them in a natural sense; thus the Lord has conjoined heaven and the world by the Word."

In Revelation the Divine proceeding from