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1108 NOTES TO VOLUME 11.
....
whom we are to believe, and what we are to believe. The reason
why truths must be taken from the Word, is, because all truths
conducive to salvation are contained therein, and are efficacious be
cause they are given by the Lord, and thence inscribed on the whole
angelic heaven; so that when man learns truths from the Word, he
enters into communion with angels, notwithstanding his ignorance of
such a connection . . . . . Thirdly, Faith is formed by man’s living
in conformity to truths; because spiritual life is a life agreeable to
truths, and truths do not begin really to live till they are in actions.
Truths abstracted from acts abide only in the thought; and if they
do not also abide in the will, they are not within the man, but stand
without at the threshold ; for the will is the real man; and thought
is so much and in such a manner the man, in proportion to the
quantity and quality of the will joined to it" (no. 347).
Such is the doctrine of the New Jerusalem concerning faith, as
taught in the works which Swedenborg, as the servant of the Lord
Jesus Christ, wrote after 1747 ; but this doctrine had been believed and
professed by him long before that time, as will appear from what follows:
A. Nature of Faith. About 1736 he wrote, "Faith is properly
this, that man believes in the Almighty God, in Christ the Saviour
of the world, and in all that which the revealed Word dictates in
the Sacred Scripture" (Posthumous Tracts, p. 11).
That faith comes from the Lord, and is truth seen from the
Lord, and not from man’s own reason, appears from the following
passage written on the cover of Codex 36 between 1736 and 1740
(see Vol. III, of Photo-lithographed MSS., p. 181) : " Observation made
during writing: The more the world is perfected in the sciences
and in learning, the more is it estranged from God, who demands
an ignorance of things, full of faith and of His praise ; so that our
sole knowledge ought to consist in praising God, and in attributing
everything to Him, and that we ought not to inquire into the
arcana of His nature, in order thereby to acquire an intellectual
faith. As the world, however, has not yet reached such a point,
and regards this as absurd, therefore I am compelled to speak so
as to convince them intellectually of every thing ; although for myself
I do not desire anything else than bare faith, and to celebrate
only His glory, as David did, and the rest in the New Testament.
Wherefore also the Lord addressed Himself to fishermen and shepherds ;
because the rest could not understand anything of this kind."
Similar views to these Swedenborg expresses in the Diary for
1744; so he says in no. 26 : "The external senses are more fallacious
than what God says, which is the Truth itself; wherefore I ought
rather to believe that than myself."
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