Now the same thing may be said of all the separate things of the soul and of the body; and nearly the same thing may be said of all the things of this world, and of our thoughts and our affections; and also of all the things of the spiritual world, and of the thoughts and affections of the angels and spirits who live there. How the things without us depend on the things within us, or how the things without the angels and spirits depend upon the things within them, you cannot now understand; but you may remember it, and when you are older, and know more, you will understand it better.

You will thus be able, in many cases, and perhaps in most cases, to know whether a comparison or metaphor is founded upon correspondence or not. But it will not always be easy, or perhaps possible, for you to know how this is, although you will always be learning more and more about it; and the science of correspondence will itself teach you, more than anything else can, how to distinguish between what belongs to this science, and what does not.

The Bible is written wholly according to cor

respondences, and no other book is; but many books have in them many similes and comparisons founded on correspondence, although the authors of the books knew nothing about it, and therefore could not possibly distinguish between comparisons which were founded upon correspondence, and those which were not.

The reason of this is, that there are a great many comparisons and resemblances between things which correspond together, which are very easily seen by every body, and which affect the mind very pleasantly when we see them, and which serve to make our meaning very much plainer, if one uses them in a right way. Therefore, many authors, and particularly poets, have made great use of these correspondences, although they were wholly ignorant why the comparisons and metaphors founded on them gave such pleasure or had such power.

You do not know yet much about poetry, but you will learn more about it as you grow older; and you will also learn more about the science of correspondence as you grow older; and in this

way you will learn, that nearly all the power and the pleasantness of the best poetry, arises from the fact that it is really founded upon the science of correspondence, although the authors did not know it, or suppose there was any such thing. Some authors have guessed at something like it, and have made many suppositions which approached the truth; in the earliest ages of the world it was well known, and some traditions of it have been handed down by one generation to another, and in this way something was always indistinctly known about it. But in modern times, not much was known of it by any one, and nothing was well and clearly known, until the science of correspondence was revealed to Emanuel Swedenborg, and by him communicated to others through his books.

LESSON

ΝΙΝΕΤΕ ΕΝΤΗ.

In my last lesson I endeavored to show you that correspondence was something more than resemblance, and that comparisons founded upon it differed in their nature from figures of speech, or metaphors.

But I wish that you should understand something further about the science of correspondence. I wish you to know that this science exists because of the way in which the Lord created the universe, and of the way in which He uttered His Word.

All life, all being, the heavens and the earth, and all the things which exist anywhere, are created by Him.

The Lord, who created all things, created them in order; He caused them all to exist in a regular arrangement. All men have some sense of order-some power of seeing whether things are in order or not; and, generally, some capacity of being pleased when they see that things are in

M

order. After you have been a forenoon in school, it may be that your books, your slate, your pens, your work, all of which you have used in turn, are in some disorder. This, I hope, pains you; and before you go away, you set all these things in order; that is, you place each thing in its proper place, and each in its proper nearness to others. Now, all the notion of order, all the capacity of order, and all the love of order which men have, comes, like every thing else that is good, from the Lord. That is, men have some love of order, because there is in the Lord a perfect love of order; and from this, as from a fountain, a love of order is perpetually flowing forth and entering into the minds of men, as far as men will permit.

But there is among men only a feeble and imperfect love of order; in the Lord the love of order is perfect; and therefore the universe which he created, containing the spiritual worlds and the natural worlds, was created in order; that is, it was so created, that all the things in it should be in their proper places, and each one in its proper nearness to or distance from all the others. Here