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 peace, intelligence, wisdom and happiness. For love receives all things whatsoever which are in agreement with itself; it longs for them, seeks after them, imbibes them as it were spontaneously; for it continually desires to be enriched and perfected by them. This is also known to man; for his love inspects as it were the stores of his memory, and draws forth thence all things which are in agreement with it; and these it collects together and arranges in and under itself;—in itself that they may be its own, and under itself that they may be subservient to it. But whatever is not in agreement with itself, it rejects and exterminates.

That every faculty for receiving truths congenial to itself, and the desire of conjoining them to itself, are inherent in love, is manifest also from those who were elevated into heaven. These, although simple in the world, when they came among the angels, entered at once into angelic wisdom and into the felicities of heaven. The reason was, that they loved good and truth for their own sake, and implanted them in their lives, and thereby acquired the faculty of receiving heaven with every ineffable thing there.

But they who are in the love of self and the world, are incapable of receiving heavenly things. They hold them in aversion, reject them, and at the first touch and influx of them they associate themselves with those in hell who are in loves similar to their own.

There were certain spirits who doubted if such things were inherent in heavenly love, and wished to know