say and commit them. Meanwhile
he is learning civil, moral and spiritual things. These enter his
thoughts and remove the unsoundness and he is healed by the Lord by means
of them, only to the extent, however, of knowing how to guard the door
unless he also acknowledges God and implores His aid for power to resist
the unsoundness. Then, so far as he resists it, he does not let it into
his intentions and eventually not even into his thoughts.

[4] Since man is free to think as he pleases to the end that his life's
love may emerge from its hiding-place into the light of his
understanding, and since he would not otherwise know anything of his own
evil and consequently would not know how to shun it, it is also true that
it would increase in him so much that recovery would become impossible in
him and hardly be possible in his children, were he to have children, for
a parent's evil is transmitted to his offspring. The Lord, however,
provides that this may not occur.

282. The Lord could heal the understanding in every man and thus cause
him to think not evil but good, and this by means of fears of different
kinds, miracles, conversations with the dead, or visions and dreams. But
to heal the understanding alone is to heal man only outwardly, for
understanding with its thought is the external of man's life while the
will with its affection is the internal. The healing of the understanding
alone would therefore be like palliative healing in which the interior
malignity, closed in and kept from issuing, would destroy first the near
and then the remote parts till all would become mortified. The will
itself must be healed, not by the influx of the understanding into it,
for that is impossible, but by means of instruction and exhortation from
the understanding. Were the understanding alone healed, man would become
like a dead body embalmed or covered by fragrant spices and roses which
would soon get such a foul odor from the body that they could not be
brought near anyone's nostrils. So heavenly truths in the understanding
would be affected if the evil love of the will were shut in.

283. Man is permitted, as was said, to think evils even to intending them
in order that they may be removed by means of what is civil, moral and
spiritual. This is done when he considers that they are contrary to what
is just and equitable, to what is honest and decorous and to what is good
and true, contrary therefore to the peace, joy and blessednes