Page:The Doctrines of the New Church Briefly Explained.djvu/153

Rh learning certain principles or laws, and then reducing these laws to practice.

Take the accomplished musician for illustration. How has he become such? He inherited the talent or aptitude for music, as we all inherit the capability of becoming angels. And so we may say the musician was in him in potency when a child. But he was yet in an embryo state. The boy was then as unconscious of the entrancing delights which the music wrapped up within him would one day produce, as a child before birth is unconscious of its latent capabilities, or of the joys of its post-natal state. Properly speaking, the musician was not yet born. He had only an embryonic or latent existence, like that of the angel in the unregenerate man.

Observe, now, the manner of his birth,—for this will illustrate the manner in which every one who becomes regenerate, is born from Above. It will show us how we are to be brought out of our natural state in which we love ourselves supremely, into the opposite state of love to the Lord and the neighbor; or how "the new man" created in the image of the Lord Jesus Christ, comes forth from "the old man" that is "corrupt according to the deceitful lusts."

First, the individual places himself, or is placed,