NEW
CHURCH LIFE
VOL. LXVI
OCTOBER, 1946
No. 10
THE
MYSTERY OF THE HUMAN WILL
AN
ADDRESS BY
THE REV. HUGO Lj. ODHNER
At
the Eighteenth General Assembly, June 17, 1946.
Everything in life proceeds
from love, centers in love, turns about love. Life
seems to have no other origin and no other goal.
From
cradle to grave, man seeks nothing but to
satisfy the inner urges that fill his body and
his soul. For
all that, our consciousness is so preoccupied
with our thoughts, our knowledge, sensations,
and actions, that we seldom reflect upon the
purposes and intentions which are concealed
within them, or consider the truth that love is
the life itself of man.
Actually, man does not
possess life, except in appearance. Life,
which is God, cannot create other “lives,”
but only receptacles which can receive life
according to their forms. Our
first acknowledgment must be that we are but
recipients, or receptions, of the life, which is
felt in us as love. That
in us which so receives life is called the Will.
And
what we receive in our Will, we feel as our own,
our life, our self!
We speak with great
assurance about our Will. But
many philosophers, observing how changeable
and fickle our mind is (when judged from its
surface reactions), have come to the conclusion
that what we have called the Will is simply the
response of the body to the stimulus of new and
old experiences,—a response conditioned by
conscious memories or states of the brain
cortex, and modified by the general tone of the
bodily tissues. In
fact, the fashion is to disclaim the existence
of both “will” and “mind,” and to regard
even the higher life of man as complicated
reflexes of the body,—physiological
processes that will cease with the body.
And to speak of the Will
and the Understanding as “faculties” has
become definitely obsolete. There is no faculty
of thinking, nor any faculty of willing; any
more (they say) than water has a faculty of
raining or the air a faculty of blowing! For
to acknowledge the existence of special human
faculties implies that there was a Creator who
endowed men with a mental equipment by which His
ends might be carried out. Perhaps
they should be excused, when they look at the
human Will as it manifests itself at this day,
if they fail to see a Divine purpose in it.
Yet certain thinkers, in
attempting to understand the mind of man, have
stressed the emotional elements, the feelings
and the instincts, as fundamental. Schopenhauer
(whose life fell in the era of disillusionment
which followed the Napoleonic wars) saw the
whole universe, not as the work of a beneficent
and wise Creator, but as emergence of a cosmic
Will,—an infinite urge or desire which caused
all finite things to hunger for wants that could
never be gratified. Life,
he felt, was evil and pain. From
utter unconsciousness, the urge to live rose
in higher creatures into a tragic sensibility of
its own futile strivings. In
man, this Will sought vainly to gain its ends
through intelligence. But
the Intellect, after blundering for ages amidst
fantastic hopes fostered by the Will, led only
to the conclusion that to circumvent the cosmic
Will one must find release in deliberate
race-extinction.
While Schopenhauer, a
lonely egoist and cynic who enjoyed no
affectional ties, thus voiced the inevitable
logic of the unregenerate will of man which
dwells among the morbid fantasies of self-pity,
it remained for a kindred genius, Friedrich
Nietzsche, to glorify the “will-to-power,”
which, he said, would create a race of supermen
who would be beyond good and evil, and thus
above both moral laws and Divine commandments. And
it remained for the strutting hordes of Nazi
hoodlums to carry this crazy logic into effect
without shame or disguise, deliberately
prostituting intelligence and science into
tools for callous self-aggrandizement.
There is nothing new or
unique in this philosophy (or sophistry) of
force. It
is the natural defence of man’s hereditary
Will. For
this, the Writings show, is centered wholly
around Self, in all of us; and it looks only to
worldly ends, causing an utter denial of
spiritual truths; and it scoffs at the uses of
the Church, which alone builds for eternity.
*
* * *
The Will is the receptacle
of life. To
understand its purpose, we must understand life.
Our
idea of life depends upon our concept of God. Schopenhauer’s
“God” was an impersonal, unconscious Will—striving blindly for infinite dominion, and
devoid of both mercy and wisdom. Its purpose was
fated to be defeated in a finite world. But
God is not such. Life,
love, is not such. And
before the fibres of the human heart were
twisted into a tangle of selfish desires,
man’s will was not insatiable, did not aspire
for infinite power, but was content to taste the
limited delights which were (and are) the
rewards of finite uses. Man’s
will lost the ability to attain happiness only
when men refused to receive the love and will of
God, and when they sought to become “as gods,
knowing good and evil.”
The Will must be regarded
as a receptacle. In
a broad sense, the whole of man constitutes this
receptacle. “The
will is the substance itself of man.” (A. C.
808) For
whatever in man is felt as not of his will, he
promptly disowns—as if it were a stranger, a
sojourner, an intruder, or even an enemy. Only
that which is of his will is really he.
Here we are faced with the
paradox that while the Will is “the entire man
as to his form” in every particular, and while
we should “beware” of the notion that the
Will is something separate from the human form
(D. L. W. 403), yet there is much in man which
does not belong to his Will. The
material body is not the man, for its
sluggishness thwarts man’s will continually. Yet
the body is such as is man’s ruling love, and
thus it actually appears in the other life. (D.
L. 369) By
the body is here meant the spiritual form which
organizes the physical substances drawn in
through the bloods. (D. L. W. 388, 370) Yet
the spirit and the physical body are equally
organic. Both
with men and with angels, the Will (with the
understanding) is in its first beginnings in the
cortical substances of their brains, and in its
derivatives in the body. (D. L. W. 403,
365—367) The
Will is not anything purely abstract in either
angels or men, but it is a substantial subject,
formed for the reception of love. And
since the inmost substances of the
brain—present in the germ-plasm and in the
nerve-fibres—are what form the heart and its
arteries and all the bodily tissues and the
organs of sense and motion, it is obvious that
the Will is everywhere such as it is in its
primes. (D. L. W. 366)
But even in the spirit or
mind of man we find resistance to the Will. The
understanding is full of objections to what the
Will proposes. And
our sensual appetites often oppose the rational
resolves of our mind. The
doctrine is given that the Lord creates for man,
not one, but two receptacles of life. One
is the Will, the other is the Understanding; and
the latter is quite distinct from the Will. Yet
it is stated that the Will cannot act at all by
itself, but only through the Understanding, or
in conjunction with it. (D. L. W. 361) The
Will is born with a man. The
Understanding is constructed from the
sensations and knowledges which man later
experiences.
But it is built by the Will, in much the same
way as the lungs are formed by the heart in
fetal life. Before birth the lungs, although
separately formed, are under the dominance of
the heart and the blood, so that they cannot act
independently. Their
function of breathing is held in abeyance, and
consequently the embryo has no life of its own,
no conscious sensation, no thought, no freedom
of action, no will and no understanding of its
own, thus no proper life.
It is the same with man’s
mind or spirit. The
understanding first arises simply as an
expression of the connate instincts, which are
present in the babe, not as his own will, but as
a mute and slumbering yearning which seeks to
become articulate and aware of itself in the
imagery formed through sensory experience. Until
the understanding is opened, there is no
self-conscious life, nor has anything of the
hereditary “will” become “man’s will.”
The Will which thus
struggles to discover itself from the time of
birth is variously described as corporeal,
sensual, and natural, and (in our race) as
utterly corrupt, destroyed, selfish and evil by
hereditary bent. It
is not worthy of the name “will,” for it is
a mere conglomerate of lusts and appetites. It
has in it nothing of good—nothing but
self-love, the love to rule, love of
preeminence, craving for sensual pleasure and
the cupidity to possess all things.
It is hard to reconcile the
familiar sight of a tender little cooing
babe—symbol of innocence and peace—with the
terrible picture which the Writings draw of the
native will. No
Schopenhauer could paint man’s will in darker
hue. No
psychoanalyst could describe in worse terms the
furtive lusts of the libido,—the wounded self-esteem, the smoldering envies which he
sees compacted in a repressed realm of
ferocious primitive instincts and emotional
stresses that wait to be released by the consent
of the understanding, and which sometimes break
loose like cruel beasts emerging from the dark
jungle of the subconscious! Our
impulse is to draw a kindly veil of
forgetfulness over these horrors, which, if we
gazed upon them long, would petrify us like
Medusa’s head!
And this, indeed, is what a
merciful Providence has done. For
when the human will became perverted in the most
ancient race, the Lord provided that the
hereditary will should be separated and closed
up, covered over and reserved, lest it should be
excited, and should overwhelm the mind with
irresistible floods of passion. (A. C. 641) This
was the salvation of the spiritual Church, and
is signified by Noah’s retreat into the ark,
the lowest mansion of which was shut up. If
the hereditary will should be counted by the
Lord as
the man, no one could rise above the level
of the brutes, no infant could ever be saved,
and the purpose of creation would meet with
defeat.
But from birth this connate
will is miraculously restrained. Normally,
man is not even aware of its raging lusts,
except by their gradual admission as intentions
of evil into the understanding; and this is
permitted only in proportion as the
understanding is equipped to analyze, to
recognize, and to challenge these intentions.
The hereditary will is not
man’s proper will. Hence
it is said that man has nothing of will when he
is born, but that both “his understanding
and his will are formed by degrees from
infancy.” (A.
C. 10298) And
note that the understanding is here mentioned
before the will! For
that will for which man is held responsible is
formed in the understanding.
The inherited will, so far
as man is concerned, is really “involuntary.”
The
teaching is, that man’s proper will is formed
in the understanding, which is seated in the
cerebrum; and it becomes his “voluntary”
because that to which man assents in his
understanding is accepted voluntarily. But
in the cerebellum, on the other hand, and in the
nerve fibres which emanate from it and are
connected with it, we find the organic bases for
the Involuntary. This
Involuntary, we are informed, is twofold. One
part is man’s hereditary, which he has from
his father and mother, and which gradually
reveals itself as man grows up. But
the other Involuntary “inflows through heaven
from the Lord,” and secretly disposes and
rules everything of man’s thought and will, if
he suffers himself to be regenerated, and then
manifests itself in adult age. (A. C. 36035) The
cerebellum is thus an agency of willing, but of
unconscious and instinctive willing. It
rules the heart and the viscera, and controls
many spontaneous functions which are “exempt
from the will of man.” The
cerebellum, as an unconscious tool of the Lord,
continually acts to balance and restore the
order in body and mind which the cerebrum (or
man’s conscious will) has abused and
distorted.
(A. C. 4325, 9670, 9683)
(The
subject of the cerebellar functions need
considerable study in this connection. The
Involuntary from the Lord should presumably be
taken as seated in the interior degrees
within the cerebellum, which are not perverted,
but which constantly neutralize the heredity
from the parents, and overrule the intentionally
controlled behavior originating in the cerebral
cortex. (A. 9683e) Heredity—as
an Involuntary derived from the parents—would
then be seated in the natural degree of
the cerebellum. (T. 160e; W.
432) And
it would consist in the order of the nerve
fibres which, connecting with the cerebellar
cortex, have confirmed the evil habits which
parents have made their second nature.
(A. 8593)
Such fibres accompany the cerebral fibres
and coordinate them.
(A. 4326)
The influx of life is into the will or
cerebellum, and from this it passes forward into
the cerebrum where the understanding is. (E.
61) Modern
neurologists recognize the cerebellum as a
storehouse of immense reserves of nervous
energy, but intimate that it institutes no
behavior patterns on its own account.)
For the proper will of man
is merely natural, and is turned away from the
influx of heaven. The
understanding is used by it to confirm the
sensual affections which it accepts from the
hereditary will.
*
*
*
*
In the mercy of the Lord,
there are many things in man that are not
man’s at all. Man
is given an inmost degree or Soul which receives
the Divine influx immediately. He
is furnished also with two interior degrees
within his mind which are beyond his power to
pervert; and through these the Lord can act, and
in these an angelic mind can be prepared, if man
consents. These
two degrees—the Spiritual and the
Celestial—are present throughout the whole
man. But
in the cerebrum they serve as the transparent
media through which the light of heaven can
inflow to give every man a faculty to think and
to see truth in the light of truth, apart from
the perverting influence of the hereditary will.
To this end it is provided
that, in infancy, and at other times when the
hereditary lusts are not aroused, there should
be formed, by means of sense-experiences,
certain states called “remains,”—states
of delight impressed deeply in the profoundest
recesses of the unformed understanding. Such
states of delight are caused by the presence of
angels who rejoice in the eternal uses which
they prophetically vision in man’s gentler
experiences; which the angels appropriate and
interpret for man, and leave as a source of
future good, and as a motive from which man can
think sympathetically from affections that are
not his own.
This is the beginning of
the miracle which lifts every man above the
brutes. It
does not necessarily make man regenerate! But
it makes it possible for everyone to become free
and responsible, so that he can become rational
and moral. By
it, the understanding can do something apart
from the native will; wherefore it can be said
that, although the hereditary will is utterly
ruined, the intellectual is preserved entire.
(A. 10296, 4328) The
understanding is free.
And it is because of this
that man’s will itself often seems to be
divided. For
sometimes we are borne away by currents of
passion which we can scarcely understand and
find it hard to control; or we may act
instinctively from some physical hunger or some
social greed or from some imposed habit—as if
from loves which we have not chosen, and of
which, perhaps, we do not approve. The
next moment our mood may change us into a
different being, and we feel a warning sense of
caution or conscience, or are lifted up by some
high aspiration. What
our real love is,—our will,—is hard to
determine
amidst the complex of our confused feelings. Where
is this unified will which is said to be the
whole man—a will moving calmly forward by
orderly progressions towards a single goal?
In early life, this lack of
interior unity is particularly observable. The
youth cannot distinguish his own forming will
from the emotional stirrings of his senses and
his hereditary inclinations, or from the
pressure of the will of others. Whatever
he learns by experience or by training, he tends
to assume as his own will, and by it he
exercises
self-control from prudence and judgment. He
critically sifts the opinions of others, and
compares their behavior with his own, adopting
what he regards as respectable, honorable, and
advantageous, and thus attains to a moral
life. His
will is being formed in the understanding. But
not necessarily in the Rational. For—as
has been observed in the world—imagination can
prevail over will. Persuasion
and suggestion, the force of example, and the
influence of the sphere of others, unconsciously
penetrate more deeply than instruction, to form
one’s willing—for good or for ill.
The doctrine reads that
“every man is both in evil and in good; nor
can he live unless he is in both.” (D. P. 227)
And
in any of these conflicting states man usually
feels as if he was acting from himself; as if
what he was for the moment was he himself, his proprium
or his “own.” This
is the great illusion of human life, which is
yet the necessary matrix in which man’s ruling
love, his will, is formed. Man’s
proper will takes more and more distinct shape
in the understanding.
But he does not regard his will as
a receptacle, but as his life.
He may indeed recognize in himself
certain
hereditary traits; he may admit that much of
what he learns in history, science, and
doctrine, is not self-derived. Yet
he glories in his own insight and
discrimination, and takes merit for the skills
which his second-hand knowledge and his native
talents bestow; thus surrounding his whole mind
with a defensive wall of conceit.
He feels increasingly that
he has a will of his own,—a will quite
distinct from the cravings of the flesh and the
lusts which were never fully revealed to him,
but which he proudly thinks that he holds well
under control by sheer strength of character or
“will-power.” His
hereditary will enters into his consciousness,
sometimes as sudden passions, and sometimes as
definite intentions of evil. He
makes these his own only when his understanding
consents to them and holds them allowable, so
that they form themselves into a purpose and
become actual evils (A. C. 4563); then they add
themselves to his will or his proprium. (A. C.
8910, 9009; S. D. 3178)
For what is received in freedom remains,
and is imputed to man because he identifies it
with himself. (A. E. 412: 19; C. L. 493, 527)
Falsities, on the other hand, become
man’s own when they enter the will, not while
they remain only in the understanding. (T. C. R.
255, 658)
*
* * *
Man believes himself free
when he thinks and acts from what he feels as
his own love or will. Yet
his feeling may be mistaken. He
may be only persuaded that the love is his own. Therefore
the Lord said, “Ye shall know the truth, and the
truth shall make you free.” Man
must choose his own love, and he cannot choose
unless he sees truth which reveals the nature
and origin of his rival affections.
It is really the
understanding, the rational, which makes man a free man. For
truths—especially the truths of innocence and
the knowledges of faith—are vessels for good. These
vessels are actuated by the life of spirits
and angels whose sphere of ideas is felt by man
as an affection or motivation, and thus as will;
giving man the sense of freedom to love what is
not his, or not as yet his, and to will what is
contrary to his former will.
The doctrine shows that
man’s understanding can be elevated into
heavenly light, and by this can be purified of
merely natural ideas, and become independent of
the will of his proprium and of its falsities. In
such states of illustration, the will may also
follow the guidance and tutelage of the
understanding, and be raised up into a purer
heat, or into selfless, spiritual love.
This is, of course, spoken
according to the appearance. The
“involuntary” or hereditary will is not
sublimated, nor is the self-conscious,
proprial will refined and elevated. But
man comes to feel as his the influx of life tempered by the angels who attend
him. Actually,
a new love and a new will
arise in his understanding, and “truths become
good,” become felt as a new motive, so that
man wills them and does them. This
new will is a new creation by the Lord (A. C.
3870); yet it is freely and rationally accepted
by man as his. “By this new will the spiritual
man is elevated by the Lord into heaven, evil
still remaining in the will that is proper to
him, which will is then miraculously separated.
. . .“ (A. C. 5113) Conscience
rears a barrier separating the old will from the
understanding. (A. C. 863e)
In a sense, the new will is
not even to be called a will. For
the good which man does from it is of the Lord
alone, not through the will, but through
conscience. (A. C. 875) It
is limited by the truths which are received
within the church, (A. C. 7233); into these the
Lord instils charity. It
begins as obedience, and develops into an
affection of doing truth (A. C. 3870), so that
man feels repugnance in acting against it, as
if it was contrary to his freedom to do so.
The new will traces its
rise to the remains of innocence which the Lord
instils in childhood. (A. C. 1555) These
are withdrawn into the inmosts of the mind in
proportion as the proprial will develops; but
when conscience is being formed, they are again
remitted into the natural mind, so far as
external things are vastated by various
experiences, (A. C. 1616; S. D. 4383e; A. C.
19); and the remains are then appropriated and
confirmed by the spiritual truths of doctrine;
so that the formation of the new will is a
continuous
process, so far as man permits. Conscience
becomes a new and heavenly “proprium,”
acquired by free choice. (A. C. l9375) It is formed
in the inmost conatus (endeavor) of man’s
thought, especially in states of
self-compulsion. Man
feels freedom whenever he follows some love. But
by choice or free decision he adopts a love as
his own, by reception or appropriation.
The understanding stands in
a measure outside of the man himself. It
is an entrance gate, a mouth, the digestive
tract and purificatory of the mind, containing
many things not of man’s will; and it is moved
by many alien affections. The
Lord provides that “the will shall receive
truths and thus goods from the understanding,
only so fast as a man as of himself removes
evils in the external man, and only so far as he
can be kept in these truths and goods to the end
of his life, lest evil be commixed with good.”
(D. P. 232 - 233)
Throughout the life of
regeneration, man fluctuates between good and
evil, or between the new proprium and the old. There
is a combat in his rational mind between the
spiritual will and the proprial will. Something
of the old proprium enters into the life of the
angels also. Yet
no man can serve two masters. Good
and evil cannot dwell together in man’s
interiors, that is, in the will itself, or in
his inmost motive. In
his interiors, after regeneration has commenced,
there is no alternation of the states of good
and evil, and thus no mixture. (D. P. 2967) The
love of spiritual uses, once established, is
constant (Div. Love, xviie), and will then
govern in all decisions wherein the rational
mind is free. The
inflowing life, instead of flowing through.
undetermined into the sensual, and being
received simply as corporeal pleasure, is caught
up in the planes of conscience and
“terminated” as good affections. (A. C.
5145) Conscience
thus gives a new quality to the whole man; for
the interior qualifies the exterior. (Char.
21) The
natural mind is reconstructed by stages, being
at first compelled into obedience, and later
suffering that great reversal of state which is
likened to the bending back of spirals into the
opposite direction. (A. C. 5128; D. L. W. 263,
254)
By regeneration man is made
new altogether. For
“angel or man is such as his love is; and this
not only in his organic beginnings . . . in
the brain, but also in the whole body.” All
things are so disposed as to receive heavenly
love. “If
you are willing to believe it, man is made a new
man; not only is he given a new will and a new
understanding, but also a new body for his
spirit.”
(A. C. 6872; Div. Wis. ive)
Nay,
the physical body is also secretly affected; man
breathes differently, and his blood absorbs the
kind of nutriment that corresponds to his
life’s love. (D. L. W. 420, 423) Through
the new spiritual will the Lord “reforms and
regenerates the natural, and, by this as a
means, the sensuals and the voluntary things of
the body, thus the whole man.” (T. C. R.
533e.)
Nevertheless, with man the
previous forms are not blotted out, but only
removed so as not to appear or interfere. (A. C.
6872; Div. Wis. ive) The
new will works slowly, like a leaven. Each
evil of proprium and of heredity must be exposed
and shunned. The
love of self must be weakened and turned—such
is the appearance—into a love of uses. (D.
P. 2335)
Sordid
delights must be dislodged by mediate goods, and
wholesome satisfactions must be substituted. Spiritual
disaster awaits any man who, in his conceit,
seeks a sudden conversion. (D. P. 2336) The
first of man to be regenerated is his Rational. Much
later, and more laboriously, the Natural; for
the imagination has to be cleansed, if man is to
receive the gifts of heaven without perverting
them. (A. C. 3469, 7442)
The Sensual degree, at the
present day, is so wholly destroyed as to its
delights and reactions that it can be reborn
with scarcely anyone. (A. C. 9726; S. D. 46298) Yet the
knowledges of the corporeal memory can be
reordered to serve genuine uses.
It is the sensuals of the
hereditary will—the “involuntary” which
has its principal seat in the cerebellum—that
cannot be amended, but only rejected. A
man’s paternal heredity will remain inscribed
on him to eternity. (A. C. 1414, 1573, 719e) Yet
evils which are sought out by self-examination,
and shunned, will not be handed on to the
offspring. (A. C. 8550, 4317, 313; T. C. R. 5213; C. L. 202-205) In
any case, this inherited will is “closed” to
man’s consciousness, and is not imputed to
him. (A. C. 8622, 9009) It
causes man’s senses to respond with pleasure
to evil suggestions, involuntarily. Yet
it can be controlled, to serve man’s
self-protective instinct as a useful
watch-dog.
When it is said that the
new will may lead to a regeneration even of
“the sensual and voluntary things of the
body,” we take this to refer to the control
which the deliberate will, acting through the
cerebrum, imposes upon the behavior of the body.
(S. D. 1970) For,
through man’s self-discipline, the cerebrum
institutes habits which the fibres of the
cerebellar nerve system are compelled to confirm
and maintain. (T. C. R. l6Oe)
Even with the prehistoric
celestial race, conscious life, as it began to
dawn with a free reception of heavenly light,
was conducted in the cerebrum. Man’s
heredity, inseated in the cerebellum, was then
good. The
men of the celestial church did not erect a
proprial will which had to be disciplined and
finally set aside. From
childhood their understanding was lifted up to
meet the currents of spiritual heat which were
received in their inherited will as a welcome
influx of creative love from their Father in the
heavens. Their
Rational originated directly from this
spontaneous conjunction of will and
understanding, so that they could be said to be
“born into all the Rational and all the
Scientific.” (A. C. 1902, 2557. See
Rational
Psychology, no. 313, ix)
To us, our will,—our
ambitions which are so likely to end in tragedy
and disillusionment,—are of central
importance. Much
though we have learned of the inexorable laws
and hidden powers of the natural universe, we
have failed to understand the simple truth that
the life which wells up within our will is not
our own. The
river of life proceeding from the throne of God
is divided into many heads ere it reaches
us—some pure in the unconscious deeps of the
soul, some mediated by the angels into good
affections, some perverted by evil spirits to
stir the powerful tides of heredity. The
springs of our life are controlled by influences
beyond analysis, before they become sensible
through our corporeal experiences, or are made
intelligible through revealed truths.
But man’s life is a
history of his free decisions, the organic
result of his reception of these influxes. In
a mysterious way these free decisions combine
man’s past with his present into a Will which,
at every juncture of his life, stands for the
sum and substance of his personality.
Actual evils, which have been
shunned, silenced and forgotten, can never be so
expunged that they have not had a restricting
and limiting effect upon the new will that is
given him by the Lord’s mercy as his; but they
remain as scar-tissue in the organism of his
spirit. For,
in our spiritual growth, every evil to which we
consent closes an avenue of influx which can
never be wholly reopened, although by repentance
other ways can be sought.
Man’s will is but a
vessel, built of borrowed stuff, and susceptible
to borrowed states. Man
has nothing of his own. (D. P. 308, 309) And
only by regeneration, when he realizes that the
influxes which cause his moods, his longings,
his will, are not his, can he begin to become
free, become something of his own (S. D. 2043,
2044) ,—a state which freely responds to all
the complex elements that are represented in his
make-up, a unique quality
of reception which is freely determined by
human choice, and which unifies his whole mind
and body for a distinct purpose, a spiritual use
which can be manifested in fullness only after
death. The
more fully an angel has surrendered his own
will, and has sought a conjunction with the will
of the Lord, the more distinctly does he feel
the delight of his freedom, his responsibility,
and his integrated individuality. (D. P. 43)
It is not that the angel is
pure—or that there is any pure good or pure
truth with him. But
he has accepted the truth of innocence which was
lost in the Garden of Eden, and which alone can
lead man back to the tree of life in the City of
God. The
time of conflict and temptation is over.
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