Page:Swedenborg's Doctrine of Correspondence.djvu/151

Rh without acknowledging their source in hell and from evil spirits, is not to shun or remove them, but to close the eye of the mind to them while cherishing the unacknowledged inward love from which they flow forth. But to acknowledge evils and falsities in one's self as flowing in from hell and through the agency of evil spirits, to repudiate them as contrary to the Word, to reject them to hell from which they proceed, to refuse them volition and act because they are wrong, and combat them as of one's self in the name of the Lord,—this is to remove evils in the external man and open the door for the Lord to come in and remove the lusts of evil in the internal, and dispose the evil spirits and their inciting sphere. This is to deny, not the reality of evil, but the reality of its pleaded rights and powers. And this denial takes place in the thought, from the will to shun evil and live according to the Lord's Word. Evil spirits rejoice and exult when they can induce man to deny the devil and the reality of evil, for then they can work where they love to work, in the dark; and flowing from the dark into man's hereditary love, lead him where they will. But if man, when any evil is presented in