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428 TESTIMONY OF CONTEMPORARIES. [Doc. 254.
lestia, nos. 3880, 549, 3993). For the sake of that sense, and
in order that there may be an exact correspondence, each
word is used in a natural sense, and for this purpose also, the
occurrences mentioned took place naturally. In this respect
it is a general rule that each word is significative and each
thing representative. The result is that many things in the
Word considered in themselves and in a merely natural sense,
appear partly to be of no value or of little account, partly to
be not very modest, partly to be full of contradictions, and
partly to be nonsensical ; when yet it is indispensable that they
should be so on account of the interior sense. No other book
can be compared with the Sacred Scripture. That the Word
in the original text could not be otherwise than it is, may be
easily inferred from what we read in Heaven and Hell, no. 254,
Arcana Calestia, nos. 3039, 7055. None of those who penned
the Divine writings knew the science of correspondences, except
Moses, who was educated in the learning of the Egyptians.
Nor was it at all necessary that they should understand it,
since the Lord Himself through an angel dictated each word
to them. That science was entirely extinguished with every
Jew, and did not exist in the least with the evangelists. All
the occurrences which they wrote, they naturally had to inquire
about and to collect, but when they began writing the gospels,
every least particular of what they wrote was from the Spirit of
the Lord’s mouth, without their knowing anything about it
themselves, or paying the least attention to it. The history
contained in the gospels is of the same kind as the true Bibli
cal history of which I spoke above ; that is, it is not for the
sake of the history related in the natural sense, but for the
sake of the Lord and His kingdom, which in a continuous
series is treated of in the spiritual sense ; different in one gospel
from what it is in another ; for the series of spiritual things
are manifold and innumerable, as appears among other things
from the difference in the genealogical records in many places,
and also in the genealogical accounts furnished by Matthew
and Luke ; for by the names in the former is described the
Lord’s assumption of humanity and His birth in the world;
and in the latter His second birth, or the glorification of His
humanity. There is no interior spiritual sense in the ’Acts of the
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