aricolored light overlays it. This
glamour is the vainglory of that love in being wise and thus also of
being eminent and dominant.

[12] And yet, when self-love has proved such things, it becomes so blind
that it sees man only as a beast, and that man and beast both think, and
if a beast could also speak, conceives it would be man in another form.
If it were induced by some manner of persuasion to believe that something
of the human being survives death, it then is so blind as to believe that
the beast also survives; and that the something which lives after death
is only a subtle exhalation of life, like a vapor, constantly falling
back to its corpse, or is something vital without sight, hearing or
speech, and so is blind, deaf and dumb, soaring about and cogitating.
Self-love entertains many other insanities with which nature, in itself
dead, inspires its fantasy. Such is the effect of self-love, which
regarded in itself is love of the proprium. Man's proprium, in respect of
its affections which are all natural, is not unlike the life of a beast,
and in respect of its perceptions, inasmuch as they spring from these
affections, is not unlike a bird of night. One who constantly immerses
his thoughts in his proprium, therefore, cannot be raised out of natural
light into spiritual light and see anything of God, heaven or eternal
life. Since the love of the proprium is of this nature and yet excels in
the ability to confirm whatever it pleases, it has a similar ability to
adulterate the goods of the Word and falsify its truths, even while it is
constrained by some necessity to confess them.

[13] 7. _The Lord therefore does not admit man inwardly into truths of
wisdom and goods of love except as man can be kept in them to the close
of life._ The Lord does this lest man fall into that most serious kind of
profanation of which we have treated in this chapter. In view of that
peril the Lord also tolerates evils of life and many heresies in worship,
the tolerance of which will be the subject of the following chapter.

XIII. LAWS ON PERMISSION ARE ALSO LAWS OF DIVINE PROVIDENCE

234. There are no laws of permission per se or apart from the laws of
divine providence; rather they are the same. Hence to say that God
permits something does not mean that He wills it, but that He cannot
avert it in view of the end, which is salvation. Whatever is done for the
sake of that end is in accord with the laws of divine providence. For
di