ander words: 'If ye were of this world the world would love you, but I
have chosen you out of the world; be ye therefore perfect as your Father
in heaven is perfect.'

"The second transformation of man is to Wisdom. Wisdom is the
understanding of celestial things to which the Spirit is brought by
Love. The Spirit of Love has acquired strength, the result of all
vanquished terrestrial passions; it loves God blindly. But the Spirit of
Wisdom has risen to understanding and knows why it loves. The wings of
the one are spread and bear the spirit to God; the wings of the other
are held down by the awe that comes of understanding: the spirit knows
God. The one longs incessantly to see God and to fly to Him; the other
attains to Him and trembles. The union effected between the Spirit of
Love and the Spirit of Wisdom carries the human being into a Divine
state during which time his soul is _woman_ and his body _man_, the last
human manifestation in which the Spirit conquers Form, or Form still
struggles against the Spirit,--for Form, that is, the flesh, is
ignorant, rebels, and desires to continue gross. This supreme trial
creates untold sufferings seen by Heaven alone,--the agony of Christ in
the Garden of Olives.

"After death the first heaven opens to this dual and purified human
nature. Therefore it is that man dies in despair while the Spirit
dies in ecstasy. Thus, the _natural_, the state of beings not yet
regenerated; the _spiritual_, the state of those who have become Angelic
Spirits, and the _divine_, the state in which the Angel exists before
he breaks from his covering of flesh, are the three degrees of existence
through which man enters heaven. One of Swedenborg's thoughts expressed
in his own words will explain to you with wonderful clearness the
difference between the _natural_ and the _spiritual_. 'To the minds of
men,' he says, 'the Natural passes into the Spiritual; they regard the
world under its visible aspects, they perceive it only as it can be
realized by their senses. But to the apprehension of Angelic Spirits,
the Spiritual passes into the Natural; they regard the world in its
inward essence and not in its form.' Thus human sciences are but
analyses of form. The man of science as the world goes is purely
external like his knowledge; his inner being is only used to preserve
his aptitude for the perception of external truths. The Angelic Spirit
goes far beyond that; his knowledge is the thought of which hu