Page:Swedenborg, Harbinger of the New Age of the Christian Church.djvu/219

 at first undeveloped, but capable of being opened and becoming lord of the house: not by any effort of the natural, but by the inflowing Divine life, when by instruction or experience the natural has been made willing to subside into its appointed place of humble service.

All this the Lord taught, not by words alone, but more emphatically by His own example, in Himself laying down the maternal human nature and living and speaking solely from the Divine Human nature within. It is this inner Divine Human life which He bade men recognize as the will of the Father, and in which He declared that whoever had seen and known Him, had seen and known the Father. In this He desired men also to understand that whatever they should be enabled to do of the Father's will, would be not of themselves, but of God. "Why callest thou Me good? None is good save One, that is, God." The comprehension of this Divine teaching was little possible to races just emerging from barbarism, or worse, from the profligacy of Roman civilization. What could they do in the way of renouncing their own will and accepting the Divine in its stead? For the time, therefore, it was permitted