Page:The Doctrines of the New Church Briefly Explained.djvu/96

90 our evils, as well as for wisdom to engage in the conflict therewith. Rightly understood, therefore, and practically viewed, this doctrine is seen to be one of supreme importance.

"By taking up the cross," says Swedenborg, "is meant to undergo temptations." (Ap. Ex. 893.) And spiritual temptations are conflicts between good and evil, or heaven and hell in the soul. "The Lord while in the world and in his human there, did, of his own proper ability, sustain and overcome all temptations; differing in this from every man, who in no case sustains and overcomes any temptation of his own proper ability, but from that of the Lord in him. . . . In spiritual temptations there is a dispute as to dominion, or as to which shall have the supremacy, the internal or the external, or what is the same, the spiritual or the natural man—these being entirely opposite to each other. When man is in temptations, his internal or spiritual man is under the Lord's rule by means of angels, but his external or natural man is under the rule of infernal spirits; and the combat between them is what is perceived in man as temptation." (A. C. n. 3927.)

"The ends to which temptations are conducive, are these: They gain for good dominion over evil, and for truth, dominion over the false; they confirm truths in the mind, and conjoin them to good; and they disperse evils and the falsities thence derived. They serve also to open the internal spiritual man, and to bring the natural into subjection to it; to destroy the loves of self and the world,