and on earth is the Lord’s body. They are in the Lord and the Lord is in
them. Loving the Lord’s kingdom, then, is fully loving their neighbor.
People who love the Lord’s kingdom not only love the Lord above all
else; they also love their neighbor as themselves. Love for the Lord is a
universal love. It affects every aspect of spiritual life and also every
aspect of earthly life. This is because love for the Lord dwells in the
highest reaches of us, and things at the top flow into things lower down
and bring them to life in the same way that our will flows into all our
intentions and actions, and our intellect flows into all our thoughts and
conversations. Therefore the Lord says,
Seek first the kingdom of the heavens and its justice. Then all these
things will be added to you. (Matthew 6 : 33 )
The kingdom of the heavens is the Lord’s kingdom, as the following pas-
sage in Daniel shows:
Behold, there was someone coming with the clouds of heaven—
someone like the Son of Humankind.He was given dominion, glory,
and a kingdom. All people, nations, and tongues will worship him.
His dominion is a dominion of an age that will not pass and his king-
dom is one that will not perish. (Daniel 7 : 13 , 14 )Loving Our Neighbor Is Not in Fact Loving the Person
but Loving the Goodness That Is inside the Person417 Surely everyone knows that people are not people because they have a
human face and body—they are people because they have wisdom in
their intellect and goodness in their will. The higher the quality of this
wisdom and goodness, the more human the people are.
When people are born they are more brutish than any animal. They
become human through being instructed. If they are responsive to the
instruction, a mind forms within them. People are human because of
their mind, depending on its particular nature.
There are animals that have faces that are close to human, but they
have no faculty for higher understanding or for taking any action on the
basis of that understanding. They act on an instinct that is activated by
their earthly love. One difference between animals and people is that ani-
mals express in sound the feelings belonging to their love, while people
speak their feelings as transferred into thought. Animals turn their faces