Page:The Other Life.djvu/165

 verse, and no two of them could have precisely the same revelation.

To see God therefore is no such wonderful and impossible thing as a sensuous mode of thought interprets it to be. It is simply to have an external or symbolic representation of the state of your own soul as to its reception of the divine love aud wisdom.

Before the Lord assumed a human form by the process of birth and growth in this world. He had no spiritual body of his own, by which He could appear to the angels. "The Angel of Jehovah " who spoke in the first person as if he was the Lord himself, was always some angel, whose consciousness and selfhood were laid entirely asleep while the Divine Spirit spake through him. When the angel returned to his own state, he had no recollection of what had transpired or of anything he had said.

Swedenborg says of this manifestation through angels, not from them:

"In order that man may be spoken to by vocal expressions, which are articulate sounds in the ultimates of nature, the Lord uses the ministry of angels by filling them with the Divine Spirit, and by laying asleep what is of their own selfhood, so