The Delights of Wisdom Pertaining to Conjugial Love. Emanuel Swedenborg

of the sun's heat with the vital heat in the living creatures of the earth and the fowls of heaven, in the time of spring during prolification. Moreover, what is conjugial love but heat, which becomes virtue or potency, if the heat supplied from the sun be added to it?" To this decision was subscribed the letter H, the initial of the kingdom from which they were.

      

      105. After this he put his hand into the urn a SECOND TIME, and took out a paper from which he read as follows: "We, natives of the same country, in our lodge have agreed that the origin of conjugial love is the same with the origin of marriages, which were sanctioned by laws in order to restrain man's innate concupiscences prompting him to adultery, which ruins the soul, defiles the reason, pollutes the morals, and infects the body with disease: for adultery is not human but bestial, not rational but brutish, and thus not in any respect Christian but barbarous: with a view to the condemnation of such adultery, marriages originated, and at the same time conjugial love. The case is the same with the virtue or potency of this love; for it depends on chastity, which consists in abstaining from the rovings of whoredom: the reason is, because virtue or potency, with him who loves his married partner alone, is confined to one, and is thus collected and as it were concentrated; and then it becomes refined like a quintessence from which all defilement is separated, which would otherwise be dispersed and cast away in every direction. One of us five, who is a priest, has also added predestination as a cause of that virtue or potency, saying, 'Are not marriages predestinated? and this being the case, are not the progeny thence issuing and the means conducive thereto, predestinated also?' He insisted on adding this cause because he had sworn to it." To this decision was subscribed the letter B. On hearing it, a certain spirit observed with a smile, "How fair an apology is predestination for weakness or impotence!"