24. Even without being aware of it, everyone thinks of an association of people as being like a single individual. Consequently everyone also immediately perceives the meaning when he hears it said that the king of a nation is its head, and his subjects the body, or that this or that person serves this or that function in the general body, meaning, in the kingdom. The same is the case with a spiritual body of people as with a civil one. The church is a spiritual body. Its head is the human God. It is apparent therefore how the church would appear in this perception of it as a single individual if one were to think not of one God as the creator and sustainer of the universe, but of more than one instead. It would appear, in this perception of it, as a single body having upon it several heads, thus not as a human entity, but as a monster. If someone were to say that the several heads possessed one essence, and that by virtue of that they together formed one head, no other idea could result from it but that either the one head had several faces, or that the several heads had one face. Thus the church would be presented to the perception as grotesque. Yet in fact one God is the head, and the body is the church, which does what it does at the bidding of the head and not on its own, as is also the case in the human individual. So it is, too, that in any one kingdom there is only one king. For more than one king would divide it, whereas one is able to hold it together.