426. (21) Spiritual and celestial love is love for the neighbor and love toward the Lord, while natural and sensual love is love of the world and love of self. By love for the neighbor we mean a love of useful services, and by love toward the Lord we mean a love of performing useful services, as we have previously shown. These loves are spiritual and celestial for the reason that to love useful services and to perform them from a love of them is divorced from a person's love of his own self-interest. For one who loves useful services spiritually regards not himself but others apart from himself, being affected by a concern for their welfare. Opposed to these loves are loves of self and the world, for loves of self and the world have regard for useful services not for the sake of others but for the sake of self; and people who do this invert Divine order, putting themselves in place of the Lord, and the world in place of heaven. Consequently they look away from the Lord and heaven, and to look away from them is to look in the direction of hell. But for more on the subject of these loves, see no. 424 above. [2] Still, a person is not as sensible and cognizant of a love of performing useful services for the sake of those useful services as he is of a love of performing useful services for the sake of himself. Therefore he also does not know, when performing useful services, whether he is doing them for the sake of the useful services or for the sake of self. Let him know, however, that he performs useful services for the sake of the useful services to the extent that he refrains from evils. For to the extent that he refrains from these, to the same extent he performs useful services, not from himself, but from the Lord. Evil and good, indeed, are opposites, and consequently to the extent that someone is not engaged in evil, to the same extent he is engaged in good. No one can be engaged in evil and in good at the same time, because no one can simultaneously serve two masters.* We have said this much to make it known that even though a person does not sensibly perceive whether the useful services he performs are for the sake of the useful services or whether they are for the sake of himself, or in other words, whether the useful services are spiritual or whether they are merely natural, still he can know it from considering whether he thinks evils are sins or not. If he thinks they are sins, and on that account does not do them, then the useful services he performs are spiritual. And when the same person refrains from sins from an aversion to them, he also begins to perceive sensibly in himself then a love of useful services for the sake of the useful services, and this because of the spiritual delight he finds in them. * See Matthew 6:24, Luke 16:13.