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A large percentage of people at the present day, even in Christian communities, feel no interest in spiritual things. Their life is purely sensuous. Their thoughts and afections are on the things of this world exclusively—its wealth, its pleasures, its honors and emoluments. These seem to them the only realities—the only things worth striving for or thinking about. Their spiritual consciousness has never been awakened, and they feel not the slightest interest in spiritual things. They have no conception of them. Such things seem to them visionary, unreal, things of the imagination merely. And as these are the things treated of in the writings of Swedenborg, such persons cannot be expected to feel any interest in these writings. They do not care to read them; or if they read they fail to understand them. It is useless, therefore, to place the New Church writ-