True Christian Religion (Chadwick) n. 147

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147. The church up to now has been almost totally ignorant of the fact that a person's every wish and thought, and consequently every action and utterance, has an internal and an external side, and people are taught from childhood to speak in accordance with the external side, no matter how much the internal disagrees. This is the origin of pretence, insincerity and hypocrisy. It follows that people are duplicitous, and the only man who is simple is the one whose external thinks and speaks, and wills and acts, in accordance with the internal. It is these people who are meant in the Word by the simple (e.g. Luke 8:15, 11:34, etc.), although they are wiser than the duplicitous. Every created thing is double or triple, as can be proved from the human body. Every nerve is composed of fibres, every fibre of fibrils; every muscle of bundles of fibres, and these bundles are composed of motor fibres; every artery is composed of a triple series of tunics. It is the same in the human mind, which is spiritually organised in the same way, because, as stated before, the human mind is divided into three levels. The highest, which is also the inmost, is called celestial, the middle spiritual, and the lowest natural. The minds of all who deny the holiness of the Word and the Lord's divinity think on the lowest level. But because they have also learned from childhood the church's teaching on spiritual matters, and they accept these though they subordinate them to natural matters - that is, various facts, political and civil behaviour - and since these lie at the bottom of the mind, ready to hand when speaking, they can draw on these when speaking in churches and meetings. The extraordinary thing is that they are then quite unaware that they are speaking and teaching otherwise than in accordance with their belief. Yet the truth is that when they are left to themselves, as they are at home, the door which blocked off the internal of their mind is thrown open, and then they sometimes laugh at what they said when speaking in public, saying in their hearts that theology is a collection of specious traps for catching doves.


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