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 appropriation and assimilation of spiritual good and truth just as the natural body grows by the digestion and assimilation of natural food.

To feed a child in heaven is to instruct it in spiritual things, and to inspire it with a heavenly affection for the truth communicated. Infants appear as infants when they first enter the spiritual world, because they cannot feel, think, love and act as adults. But their destiny is human, not infantile. Their organs receptive of divine life must grow and develop. By successive appropriations of spiritual goods and truths, they attain to the form and uses of adult life; and their spiritual bodies grow proportionately until they reach the typical standard.

The adult natural body is kept in life and action by a continual circle of waste and supply, a continual casting off and a continual renewal of its elements. So it is with the spiritual body. It is wrought by means of spiritual goods and truths. It must render back all it receives. Woe to it, if in the spirit of selfishness it would keep anything to itself. It must exhale, radiate, distribute, impart to others all the good and truth it has acquired. It receives only on the condition of giving. Its life is held on a tenure of perpetual uses, of ceaseless,