Page:The Doctrines of the New Church Briefly Explained.djvu/230

224 being with those who are in complete sympathy with him, and whom he seems to have known from earliest infancy. And as those of the same society are all in a similar kind and degree of good, there is a family likeness even in their faces; for in heaven the face is a perfect index or mirror of the mind. There is an endless diversity among the heavenly societies, no two of them being in the same kind and degree of good and truth. In this respect they resemble the various organs of the human body, with which they perfectly correspond—so perfectly, indeed, that the whole heaven appears before the Lord as one man, and is often called by Swedenborg, Maximus Homo. Does it seem absurd to speak of the whole heaven of angels as resembling one man, or to call heaven "the Greatest Man"? There is no other conceivable way in which the exact truth could be so well or so concisely expressed. For the meaning is simply this: That the diversity, unity, harmony, mutual dependence, and perfect concert of action existing among the societies which constitute the whole heaven of angels, are similar to, and perfectly correspondent with, what are known to exist among the different parts of the human body. And were we seeking for. something to illustrate the most perfect unity and harmony coupled with mutual