there is no relation or progression of
good to evil, but a relation and progression of good to a greater and
less good, and of evil to a greater and less evil; for in all things
there are opposites. And since good and evil are opposites, there is an
intermediate, and in it an equilibrium, in which evil acts against good;
but as it does not prevail, it stops in a _conatus_. Every man is
educated in this equilibrium, which, because it is between good and
evil, or, what is the same, between heaven and hell, is a spiritual
equilibrium, which, with those who are in it, produces a state of
freedom. From this equilibrium, the Lord draws all to himself; and if a
man freely follows, he leads him out of evil into good, and thereby into
heaven. The case is the same with love, especially with conjugial love
and adultery: the latter love is evil, but the former good. Every man
that hears the voice of the Lord, and freely follows, is introduced by
the Lord into conjugial love and all its delights and satisfactions; but
he that does not hear and follow, introduces himself into adulterous
love, first into its delights, afterwards into what is undelightful, and
lastly into what is unsatisfactory." When I had thus spoken, the two
angels asked me, "How could evil exist, when nothing but good had
existed from creation? The existence of anything implies that it must
have an origin. Good could not be the origin of evil, because evil is
nothing of good, being privative and destructive of good; nevertheless,
since it exists and is sensibly felt, it is not nothing, but something;
tell us therefore whence this something existed after nothing." To this
I replied, "This arcanum cannot be explained, unless it be known that no
one is good but God alone, and that there is not anything good, which in
itself is good, but from God; wherefore he that looks to God, and wishes
to be led by God, is in good; but he that turns himself from God, and
wishes to be led by himself, is not in good; for the good which he does,
is for the sake either of himself or of the world; thus it is either
meritorious, or pretended, or hypocritical: from which considerations it
is evident, that man himself is the origin of evil; not that that origin
was implanted in him by creation; but that he, by turning from God to
himself, implanted it in himself. That origin of evil was not in Adam
and his wife; but when the serpent said, 'In the day that ye shall eat
of the tree of the know