Page:The Doctrines of the New Church Briefly Explained.djvu/229

Rh or enterprise on earth. These are: 1st. The persons who conceive and start the enterprise, and perhaps furnish the needed capital: 2d. Those who have the requisite knowledge to carry it forward to completion: and 3d. Those who do the work, or obey the directions of the knowing ones immediately above them. These three classes, which are to be found co-existing everywhere in the most advanced Christian civilization, are seen to stand to each other in the relation of end, cause and effect, and may serve as an illustration of the three angelic heavens. Viewed naturally, they are together on the same plane here, being all in the natural realm; but viewed spiritually, as to intention, thought and intelligence touching the enterprise, they are on different planes separated by a discrete degree, yet each flowing into and animating the next below it; and so the three classes act simultaneously by correspondence as one mind. Then the angels of each heaven are arranged into innumerable societies, some of them consisting of myriads, others of thousands, and others still of some hundreds, of angels. There is nothing forced or arbitrary in this arrangement. Each one goes in freedom to the society of those who are most like himself, being drawn thither by the law of spiritual affinity which attracts and holds like ones together. There he is perfectly at home,