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I was astonished how inevitable it appeared to me now that we should be riding together on such terms; and I understood that never, for one instant, all through this miserable year away from her, had I ever, interiorly, loosed my hold upon her. Beneath all my resolutions and wilful distractions the intention had persevered. Well; the heart had been right, after all.
There is not an exterior detail in the Gospel which may not be interiorly repeated in the spiritual life of a sinner; the process recorded by the Evangelists must be more or less identical with the process of all apostasy from God.
Those who are in self-love desire to domineer over the universe, yea, to extend its limits in order to enlarge their dominion, of which they see no end: those who are in the love of the world desire to possess whatever the world contains, and are full of grief and envy in case any of its treasures are hid and concealed from them by others: therefore to prevent such persons from becoming mere concupiscences, and thereby no longer men, they are permitted in the spiritual world to think from a fear of the loss of reputation, and thereby of honor and gain, and also from a fear of the law and its penalties, and also to give their mind to some study or work whereby they are kept in externals and thus in a state of intelligence, however wild and insane they may be interiorly."
VIII. THESE APPEARANCES ARE ASSUMED CONJUGIAL SEMBLANCES; AND THEY ARE COMMENDABLE, BECAUSE USEFUL AND NECESSARY. They are called assumed semblances, because they exist with those who disagree in mind, and who from such disagreement are interiorly in cold: in this case, when they still appear to live united, as duty and decency require, their kind offices to each other may be called assumed conjugial semblances; which, as being commendable for the sake of uses, are altogether to be distinguished from hypocritical semblances; for hereby all those good things are provided for, which are commemorated in order below, from article XI-XX. They are commendable for the sake of necessity, because otherwise those good things would be unattained; and yet the parties are enjoined by a covenant and compact to live together, and hence it behoves each of them to consider it a duty to do so.
Then appearing to me, as on other occasions, in an imaginary vision, most interiorly, He held out His right hand and said: "Behold this nail! it is the pledge of thy being My bride from this day forth.
Interiorly, the building of the natural history museum is admirably adapted for its purpose. Its galleries are for the most part well lighted, and the main central hall is particularly well adapted for an exhibition of specimens, to which I shall refer more at length in a moment. For the rest there is no striking departure from the conventional.
It is more excellent than union, the fruits of it are much greater, and its other operations more manifold; for union is uniform in the beginning, the middle, and the end, and is so also interiorly. But as raptures have ends of a much higher kind, they produce effects both within and without.
If the Levite of Ephraim be not the best of my works, it will ever be that most esteemed. I have never read, nor shall I ever read it again without feeling interiorly the applause of a heart without acrimony, which, far from being embittered by misfortunes, is susceptible of consolation in the midst of them, and finds within itself a resource by which they are counterbalanced.
Moreover, the spirits of the earth Jupiter are much wiser than the spirits of our Earth; they also say of ours that they talk much and think little, and that therefore they cannot interiorly perceive many things, and that they cannot even perceive what good is. They conclude from this that the men of our Earth are external men.
From these premises it follows as a conclusion that the mind, by a continual influx, arranges the body so that it may act similarly and simultaneously with itself; wherefore the bodies of men viewed interiorly are merely forms of their minds exteriorly organized to effect the purposes of the soul.
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