Page:The Swedenborg Library Vol 1.djvu/221

 They who belong to it, acknowledge and adore the Lord apart from all power of saving. They entirely separate his Divine from his human, and transfer to themselves his Divine power which belonged to his Human; for they remit sins; they send to heaven; they cast into hell; they save whom they will; they sell salvation; thus arrogating to themselves things which belong to the Divine power alone. And since they exercise this power, it follows that they make gods of themselves, each one according to his station, by transferrence from their highest whom they call Christ's vicar, down to the lowest of them; thus they regard themselves as the Lord, and adore Him not for his but for their sakes. They not only adulterate and falsify the Word, but even take it away from the people lest they should enter into the smallest light of truth; and not satisfied with this, they even annihilate it, acknowledging a divinity in the decrees of Rome superior to the Divinity in the Word; so that they exclude all from the way to heaven; for the acknowledgment of the Lord, faith in Him, and love to Him, are the way to heaven; and the Word is what teaches the way. Whence it is, that without the Lord through the medium of the Word, there is no salvation. They strive with all diligence to extinguish the light of heaven which is from divine truth, in order that ignorance may exist in the place of it; and the denser the ignorance, the more acceptable it is to them. They extinguish the light of heaven by