us as temples of God is our salvation and eternal life. Salvation and eter-
nal life relate to our will, where our purpose, goal, and plan reside. As we
go along, we take in teachings about faith and goodwill from our parents,
teachers, and preachers. When we come into our own judgment, we take
in teachings about faith and goodwill from the Word and religious books.
These are all means to an end. These means have to do with our intellect.
Finally we end up being useful by following teachings as the means; this
happens through the physical actions called good works. Therefore our
purpose employs means to produce results that are in respect to their
essence the result of our purpose, in respect to their form the result of the
teachings of the church, and in respect to their ultimate action the result
of our useful service. This is how we become temples of God.
(b) Goodwill and faith are transient and exist only in our minds unless, 375
when an opportunity occurs, they culminate in actions and become embodied
in them.We have both a head and a body. They are joined by the neck.
The mind that wills and thinks is found in our head, and the power that
acts and carries out is found in our body. If therefore we had only benev-
olence, or thoughts based on goodwill, but we did not do anything good
or produce anything useful as a result, we would be like a head by itself
or a mind by itself, which could not continue to exist on its own without
a body. Surely everyone can see from this that goodwill and faith are not
goodwill and faith when they are only in our head and our mind but not
in our body.
Under those circumstances goodwill and faith are like birds flying in
the sky that have no home of their own on the ground. They are like
birds that are about to lay eggs but have no nests; the eggs slip out of
the birds into the air or onto a twig of some tree and then fall and
smash on the ground.
All things in our mind have a corresponding element in our body.
The corresponding thing could be called an embodiment. Therefore
when goodwill and faith are only in our mind, they are not embodied in
us. Under those circumstances we could be compared to the airy human
figures known as ghosts, as Fama was depicted by the ancients, with a
laurel wreath on her head and a horn of plenty in her hand. Because we
would then be ghosts and yet would still be able to think, we could not
help being constantly hounded by mental images (a problem also caused
by false inferences based on various kinds of sophistry). We would be
much like swamp reeds blown around by the wind that have shells at
their base underwater and frogs croaking at the surface. Surely we can see
§375 faith 449