Page:The Doctrines of the New Church Briefly Explained.djvu/119

Rh of the things which it most deeply concerned him to know. He lost all knowledge of his inner and superior life—all perception of the laws, capabilities and undying needs of his own soul. It was this loss, therefore, which rendered a Divine Revelation necessary. What else, then, but spiritual things—God, the soul, immortality, redemption, regeneration, retribution, sin, holiness, heaven and its blessedness, hell and its misery,—can the Bible, when rightly understood and interpreted, have been given to teach us? Yet we know that it treats or appears to treat much of natural and temporal things. We know that it abounds in the mention of times, places, persons, things and events belonging to this, natural world. But according to Swedenborg all these natural and temporal things are but symbols of something spiritual. They all have a