Page:Swedenborg's Doctrine of Correspondence.djvu/52

46 Dr. Wilkinson, "is the only thing that can arrest the divine life, and be animated by it into an appearance of life; which everlasting appearance is man's life. To produce this death matter is the last office of the natural sun. That sun must be dead to effect this end. It is the same problem as man's arising from unconscious enbryohood and infancy into personal and mental existence; he springs from apparent non-entity in these respects into a marked individual. This he can only do through experiences, all of which are transacted and gained through the natural brain and material body. The sun, the fountain of matter, space and time, has to make these conditional things for this use. All mental or personal development, to be lasting, must begin at the bottom; even all angelhood must rise from the ranks, and be a mere private soldier of Christ here, before he is a Captain above. And this is why a mortal or terrene body is required to individualize by the first and lowest experiences, and to make the vessel which hereafter can receive and hold the divine projection of deathless life. We know that matter or dead natural substance exists; we know that our embodiment through it is the condition