Conjugial Love (Acton) n. 534

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534. After this I spoke with the angels and said, "In the world yet one more thing is revealed by the Lord." "What is that?" they asked, and I answered: "Concerning love truly conjugial and its heavenly delights." The angels then said: "Who does not know that the delights of conjugial love exceed the delights of all other loves? and who cannot see that there is some love into which are gathered all the blessedness, happiness, and delight that can ever be conferred by the Lord? and that the receptacle of these is love truly conjugial?--a love which can receive and perceive them with fullness of sensation." I answered: "Men do not know this because they have not approached the Lord and lived according to His commandments by shunning evils as sins and doing goods; and love truly conjugial with its delights is solely from the Lord, and is given to those who live according to His commandments. Thus it is given to those who are received into the Lord's New Church, which is meant in the Apocalypse by the New Jerusalem." To this I added: "I am in doubt whether at this day men in the world are willing to believe that in itself this love is a spiritual love and therefore has its existence from religion, for they cherish only a corporeal idea concerning it." The angels then said to me: "Write about it, and follow the revelation. The written book shall then be let down by us out of heaven and we shall see whether what is written therein is received, and at the same time, whether men are willing to acknowledge that this love is with man according to his religion--spiritual with the spiritual, natural with the natural, and merely carnal with adulterers."


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