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 a difficult point to understand. For while there is a correspondence, as already described, between the production of natural objects by the influence of the natural sun, and that of spiritual objects by the influence of the spiritual sun, it is still true that these operations are, in their essential nature, entirely unlike. The one is dead, as compared with the other, which is the operation of life itself. I cannot so well express the idea, which I here wish to convey, as by a brief quotation from "The Divine Love and Wisdom:"

"Since the sun of the natural world is pure fire, and for that reason dead, therefore the heat thence proceeding is dead heat, and the light thence proceeding is dead light. By parity of reasoning, the atmospheres, the æther and the air,—which receive and communicate the heat and light of that sun, are dead; and being dead, all and singular the things of the world which is subject to them, and is called earth, are dead. Nevertheless all and singular these things are surrounded by spiritual things which proceed and flow from the sun of the spiritual world; and unless they were thus surrounded, the earths could not have been actuated, and made capable of producing forms of uses, that is, vegetables, or forms of life, that is, animals; or of furnishing a supply of materials for the existence and subsistence of man.

"Now since nature begins from that sun, and all that exists or subsists therefrom is called natural, it follows that nature, with all and singular the things appertaining to it, is dead. The appearance of nature as alive in men and animals, is owing to the life which accompanies and actuates nature.

"Since the lowest substances of nature, which constitute earths, are dead, and are not mutable and variable according to the state of the affections and thoughts, as in the spiritual world, but immutable and fixed, therefore in nature there are spaces, and distances of spaces. Such things are the consequences of creation closing there, and subsisting in a state of rest."—Nos. 158—160.

Let us endeavor to illustrate this principle a little more fully. In the natural world we are surrounded by external forms, existing in accordance with certain laws, which