True Christian Religion

...were attributes of the one God, which were called "gods" because divinity was present in each of them. original: "tributa unius Dei essent, quæ dii vocati sunt, quia singulis illis divinitas inerat." This concludes the thought from the previous page regarding how ancient peoples fragmented the single Divine into various mythological figures.

10. Every sound mind, even if not religious, can see that anything divided will fall apart of itself unless it depends on a single point of unity. For example, a Human being is woven together from so many members, viscera, and sensory and motor organs, yet would collapse without a single soul; and the Body itself would fail without a single heart. Similarly, a Kingdom cannot stand without one King; a Household without one master; and every function, which is manifold in any Kingdom, must trace back to one presiding officer. What value would an Army have against enemies without a General who holds supreme power, with subordinate officers under him, each having their own right of command over the soldiers? It would be the same with the Church if it did not acknowledge one God, and also with the angelic Heaven, which is like the head of the Church on earth, and in which the Lord is the Soul itself. This is why Heaven and the Church are called His Body; if they did not acknowledge one God, both would be like a lifeless corpse which, being useless for anything, would be cast out and buried.

11. IV. THAT NATIONS AND PEOPLES HAVE WANDERED, AND STILL WANDER, INTO DIFFERENT CONCEPTIONS OF THE NATURE OF THE ONE GOD FOR SEVERAL REASONS.

The first reason is that knowledge about God, and the resulting acknowledgment of God, is not possible without Revelation. Furthermore, knowledge of the Lord—and the acknowledgment that in Him dwells all the fullness of the Divinity bodily—is only possible from the WordIn this context, "The Word" refers to Sacred Scripture, which the author views as the ultimate communication from the Divine., which is the Crown of Revelations. For through the Revelation provided, a person can approach God and receive influxThe spiritual process by which life and thought flow from God into the human mind., and thus be changed from a "natural" person into a "spiritual" one. A primary Revelation once spread throughout the entire world, but the "natural man" perverted it in many ways; this gave rise to the divisions, disagreements, heresies, and religious schisms we see.

The second reason is that the Natural manThe "natural man" refers to a person who focuses only on the physical world and the five senses, as opposed to the "spiritual man" who perceives deeper truths. cannot perceive anything of God, but only of the World, and applies this only to himself. For this reason, it is a canon of the Christian Church that the Natural man is opposed to the Spiritual man, and that they fight against each other. From this it follows that those who have learned that God exists—whether from the Word or from some other Revelation—have diverged and continue to diverge regarding the Quality of God and His Unity. Consequently, those whose mental vision depended on the physical senses, yet who still wished to "see" God, fashioned for themselves Idols of gold, silver, stone, and wood, so that they might worship God under those forms as objects of sight. Others, who rejected idols for religious reasons, fashioned images of God for themselves out of the Sun, Moon, Stars, and various things on earth. Yet others, who believed themselves to be wiser than the common people but remained "natural," acknowledged Nature as God—some seeing Him in its innermost workings and others in its outermost effects—because of God's immensity and omnipresence in creating the World. Some, in an attempt to separate God from nature, devised a most universal abstraction which they called the Being of the universeoriginal: "Ens universi" — a philosophical term for a vague, impersonal "Universal Being" or "Entity of the Universe."; and because they know nothing more about God, this "Being" is for them merely a "being of reason," which signifies nothing at all.

Who cannot understand that knowledge of God is like a mirror of God? Those who know nothing of God do not see Him in a mirror placed before their eyes, but in a mirror turned the wrong way, or from the back, where the mercury or "black glue" covers it; it does not reflect the image, but smothers it. Faith in God enters a person through the Prior WayThe "inner path" or "internal way.", which is from the soul into the higher parts of the intellect; but knowledge of God enters through the Posterior WayThe "outer path" or "external way," meaning knowledge gained through the senses and reading., because it is drawn from the revealed Word by the Intellect through the physical senses. In the "middle" of the Intellect, these two flows of influence meet. There, "natural faith" (which is merely a matter of being persuaded) becomes "spiritual faith," which is true acknowledgment. Therefore, the human Intellect is like a marketplace or exchange, in which this transformation takes place.

12. V. THAT HUMAN REASON CAN PERCEIVE OR CONCLUDE FROM MANY THINGS IN THE WORLD, IF IT IS WILLING, THAT GOD EXISTS AND THAT HE IS ONE.

This truth can be confirmed by countless things in the visible World; for the Universe is like a Theater, upon which testimonies that God exists and that He is one are continually exhibited. But to illustrate this, I will bring forward this MEMORABLE OCCURRENCE from the Spiritual World. Once, while I was speaking with Angels, some Newcomers from the natural world were present. Seeing them, I wished them a happy arrival and told them many unknown things about the Spiritual World. After this talk, I asked them what learning they had brought from the world regarding God...