Page:Swedenborg, Harbinger of the New Age of the Christian Church.djvu/170

 Spirit to receive faith without reasoning upon it, and thus to be assured in respect to it. I then saw as it were below me my own thoughts by which faith was confirmed; I laughed in my mind at them, but still more at those by which they were impugned and opposed. Faith appeared to be far above the thoughts of my understanding. Then only I got peace: may God strengthen me in it! For it is His work; and mine so much the less as my thoughts, and indeed the best of them, hinder more than they are able to promote. . . . It is therefore a higher state—I am uncertain whether it is not the highest—- when man by grace no longer mixes up his understanding in matters of faith; although it appears as if the Lord with some persons permits the understanding to precede such states of assurance in respect to things which concern the understanding. 'Blessed are they who believe and do not see.' This I have clearly written in the Prologue [to The Animal Kingdom]; yet of my own self I could never have discovered this or arrived at the knowledge of it, but God's grace has wrought this, I being unconscious of it: afterward, however, I perceived it from the very effect and the change in my whole