Page:The Doctrines of the New Church Briefly Explained.djvu/199

Rh thrown open to her, and she is beginning to be admitted to their privileges on equal terms with her brothers. If this change has not been wrought directly by the writings of Swedenborg or their students, it cannot be denied that it is directly in the line of their teachings, and may be fairly claimed, therefore, as one of the normal results of the last Judgment and new Dispensation.

According to the teaching of the New Church, sex belongs to the soul not less than to the body; and it is therefore eternal in its duration as the soul itself. And since the death of the body works no change in the soul, it leaves the sexes, with all their essential longings and characteristics, the same in the spiritual as they are in the natural world. And as it is the Lord's will that all orderly and innocent loves should be gratified, therefore there are marriages in heaven.

Marriage is regarded by the New Church as a most sacred institution, having its origin in the divine and eternal union of Love and Wisdom in the Lord, and being itself a faint image of that union. The spiritual or heavenly marriage is the conjunction of good and truth, or of love and wisdom, in the individual soul; and this takes place in the degree that a man, through religious obedience to the truth received into his understanding, unites or marries that truth to love in the will; and in so far as this takes place, he is