move; or, perhaps, you hurt yourself, by stumbling about where you could walk forward well enough if you had light. And besides, you can hardly be sure of anything if you can see nothing, or if the feeble light shows things obscurely, and makes them look like what they are not.

Is it not just so, as to the heat and light of the mind? Suppose that you love to do well, and desire to be useful, and kind, and obedient, and have good affections; and suppose, also, that you were never taught or neglected to learn what things were good and what were evil, and what God commands, and what it is proper to do in one case or another. Do you not see you would then have heat in your minds, but not light? That you would have love without truth, or desire without knowledge? Do you not see that you would go along blindly, perhaps not knowing what to do, and therefore doing nothing; or making bad mistakes, which must cause much trouble to yourselves and others? Then would you be like one who tries to walk where there is no light, running

G*

along, perhaps, at a venture, or stopping from fear, or stumbling at every step.

This would be bad enough; but to have light without heat would be yet worse. With heat and no light, we might, perhaps, live on, and do some things useful, though few and small ones. But without heat we must perish at once, whatever light we might have. You never saw any body frozen to death, but such a thing has happened; and you can easily understand that very extreme cold would kill any one; and if all our warmth were taken away, we should be colder than you can possibly form any idea of. But, you can also understand that we must die without heat, by considering what winter is. that our eyes are pained; us no food; and if the year round, we must die as soon as the food we have now is eaten, because it would be impossible to get any more. If the winter continued, the trees could not leaf out, and no plants could grow, and therefore we should have neither fruit, nor vegetables, nor bread. And the grass would not

Sometimes it is so bright and yet the light gives winter continued all the

come out of the ground, so that animals would have nothing to eat, and would die; and then we should have neither meat, nor milk, nor butter; and without food we must perish of hunger. Moreover, without supposing the cold to be severe enough to kill us, you know how very uncomfortable cold makes us, and how unwilling and even unable to do anything we are, when suffering from extreme cold.

Now, all this is just as true of the heat and cold of our souls as of the heat and cold of our bodies, because they correspond exactly together. And therefore, you may know, and I hope will remember, that merely learning truth is of little or no use; to make it useful, and to keep our souls alive, we must love the truth, and love the good things which truths teach or enable us to do. You are none the better for what you know, unless you love the truth, or what the truth teachIf you are ever so industrious in learning your lessons and acquiring information, this, although necessary and proper, is but one half of what is necessary and proper. You must do the

es.

other half; you must heartily endeavor to put away from you the perverse and evil dispositions that make you dislike the things which what you learn teaches you to do; and if you endeavor to resist and overcome these wicked dispositions, the Lord will help you, and then you will love to learn, and you will also love what you learn; and then the light which comes into your understandings will bring its heat with it, which will enter into your affections. And as the sunbeams bring heat and light together to the earth, and therefore cover it with beauty, and make it fruitful, and give life to all who dwell upon it, so, then, the beams of the spiritual sun will flow into you, with the light of truth and the warmth of love together, and will give you the beauty of goodness, and will make your life very fruitful of good works; and as every day passes you will go nearer and nearer to heaven, where the spiritual sun never sets.

I have said, in this lesson, that you must love the truth, and what the truth teaches you to do, if you would "keep your souls alive." Now you know your souls cannot die, because, when your

body dies, your souls do not die with it, but you immediately begin to live in the spiritual world. You may therefore wish to ask why it is necessary to do any thing to keep your souls alive, seeing that they cannot possibly die.

This question I will endeavor to answer in the next lesson. And I shall answer it by trying to explain to you what the death of the soul is. And in explaining this I shall again make use of what we have learnt of the correspondence and signification of the sun.