Page:The Doctrines of the New Church Briefly Explained.djvu/69

Rh wisdom or good and truth) in his mind, there proceeded from him a sphere of beneficent life and action, imaging in a finite degree the Divine Proceeding, or the sphere of the Divine Beneficence. Man did not then receive truth separate or disjoined from its corresponding affection of goodness; but his will was in perfect agreement with his understanding, and his works were therefore all good. Thus he was in a state of spiritual agreement or conjunction with God, uniting in himself each element, and therefore being a finite image, of the Divine Trinity. Accordingly he is represented, in the symbolic language of Scripture, as being originally placed "in the garden of Eden," for his innocent and blissful state is just what such a garden corresponds to or symbolizes. But he did not continue in that blissful state. Through an abuse of the human faculties with which he was gifted, and without which he would not have been man, he gradually came to think his wisdom and goodness his own, and to be puffed up with pride on account of them. And so from loving and worshiping God, he came at last to love and worship himself. From being a true, he came to be a false and inverted, image of the Creator. From his Eden state of supreme love God, he fell into a state of supreme self-love which is infernal—the very opposite of that in which he was originally created. His whole moral nature