Page:The Doctrines of the New Church Briefly Explained.djvu/201

Rh the former, truth or the masculine element is exterior and predominant, and with the latter, love or the feminine element. And when a married couple on earth are fully regenerated—if they are from creation the complements of, and thus perfectly adapted to, each other—they are no longer two but one; each living in and for the other, thinking, perceiving, feeling and enjoying as one mind. They are then "one flesh," inseparably joined by God in their very constitution and mutual adaptation to each other, "like the angels in heaven;" and their delights in the hereafter are ineffable and inconceivable.

But the natural love of the sex as felt by the merely natural man, is a low animal passion, more or less defiled with impurity like all his other loves. But it is the germ or early blossom of something transcendently more beautiful and precious. The natural love of the sex is, by regeneration, purified, exalted, ennobled, and so changed into what Swedenborg calls "love truly conjugial," which is a spiritual and heavenly love, the sweetness and felicities of which transcend immeasurably the delights of the love immediately succeeding the earthly nuptials.

Owing to the present disorderly and unspiritual state even of the Christian world, it is not to be supposed that there are at this time many true marriages, or unions that are "truly conjugial."