ought to manage and prepare the state of our life now for the state of
eternal life.
The things that have been unknown are these: We are nothing but an
organ that receives life. Everything belonging to life flows into us from
the God of heaven, who is the Lord. There are two faculties in us that
receive life: they are called the will and the intellect. The will is a vessel
for love and the intellect is a vessel for wisdom. Therefore the will is a
vessel for goodwill and the intellect is a vessel for faith.
[ 2 ] All our willing and all our understanding flow in from outside us.
The good impulses that relate to love and goodwill and the true insights
that relate to wisdom and faith flow in from the Lord. All the things that
oppose these flow in from hell. The Lord has provided that we feel inside
us, as if they were our own, the things that flow in from outside. As a
result, we produce from ourselves good impulses and true insights as if
they were our own, although none of them is actually ours. They are
nonetheless attributed to us as our own in order to give us free choice in
willing and thinking, and to grant us concepts of what is good and what
is true from which we can freely select whatever suits our temporal and
eternal life.
[ 3 ] If you look askance or through squinting eyes at what I have just
presented, you might draw many insane conclusions from it; but if you
look at it squarely, you will be able to draw many wise conclusions from
it. To help you look at it squarely, I needed first to present judgments and
crucial teachings related to God and the divine Trinity. Later in the work
I will lay out judgments and crucial teachings related to faith and good-
will, free choice, reformation and regeneration, and the assignment of
spiritual credit or blame, as well as repentance, baptism, and the Holy
Supper as means to an end.363 Now to the current point about faith—namely, that the Lord, good-
will, and faith form a unity in the same way our life, our will, and our
intellect form a unity; and if we separate them, each one crumbles like a
pearl that is crushed to powder. To see and acknowledge the truth of this,
it is important to consider it in the following order:
a. The Lord flows into everyone with all his divine love, all his divine
wisdom, and all his divine life.
b. Therefore the Lord flows into everyone with the entire essence of
faith and goodwill.
c. These qualities are received by us according to our form.