Repentance: From “Divine Providence” by Emanuel Swedenborg (vegetarian), Part 2 of 2

Let us continue with excerpts from Chapter 6 of “Divine Providence” by Emanuel Swedenborg (vegetarian), where he explains the perpetual effort of the Lord in His Divine Providence to conjoin man with Himself, and through repentance to GOD, we can obtain salvation.

Chapter 6 Divine Providence

“Man knows nothing at all of the interior state of his mind or internal man, yet infinite things are there, not one of which comes to his knowledge. His internal of thought or internal man is his very spirit, and in it are things as infinite and innumerable as there are in his body, in fact, more numerous. For his spirit is man in its form, and all things in it correspond to all things of his body. Now, just as man knows nothing by any sensation about how his mind or soul operates on all things of the body as a whole or severally, so he does not know, either, how the Lord works on all things of his mind or soul, that is, of his spirit. The Divine activity is unceasing; man has no part in it; still the Lord cannot purify a man from any lust of evil in his spirit or internal man as long as the man keeps the external closed. Man keeps his external closed by evils, each of which seems to him to be a single entity, although in each are infinite things. When a man removes what seems a single thing, the Lord removes infinite things in it. So much is implied in the Lord’s purifying man from the lusts of evil in the internal man and from the evils themselves in the external.

Many believe that a person is purified from evils merely by believing what the church teaches; some, by doing good; others by knowing, speaking and teaching what is of the church; others by reading the Word and books of devotion; others by going to church, hearing sermons and especially by observing the Holy Supper; still others, by renouncing the world and devoting oneself to piety; others still by confessing oneself guilty of all sins; and so on. And yet none of these things purifies man at all unless he examines himself, sees his sins, acknowledges them, condemns himself on account of them, and repents by desisting from them, and does all this as of himself, yet with the acknowledgment in heart that he does so from the Lord. […]

The perpetual effort of the Lord in His Divine Providence is to conjoin man with Himself and Himself with man, in order to be able to bestow the felicities of eternal life on him, which can be done only so far as evils with their lusts have been removed. […]”