smallest and invisible vessels would be open, and the man would be without disease, and would only decrease to ultimate old age, until he became altogether an infant, but a wise one. When the body could no longer minister to its internal man, or spirit, he would pass without disease out of his terrestrial body, into a body such as the angels have, thus out of the world immediately into heaven.—Heavenly Arcana, 5711-5726.
In the spiritual world diseases are evils and falses, spiritual diseases being nothing else; for evils and falses take away health from the internal man, and induce sicknesses in the mind, and at length pains; nor is any thing else signified in the Word by diseases. That in the Word physicians, the art of physic, and medicines, signify preservations from evils and falses, is manifest from the passages where they are named.—Heavenly Arcana, 6504.
By diseases are signified spiritual diseases, which are evils destroying the life of the will of good, and falses destroying the life of the understanding of truth, in a word destroying the spiritual life which is of faith and charity. Natural diseases also correspond to such, for every disease in the human race is from that source, because from sin. Every disease also corresponds to its evil; because the all of the life of man is from the spiritual world; wherefore if his spiritual life sickens, evil is also thence derived into the natural life, and becomes a disease there.
Inasmuch as diseases represented the iniquities and evils of spiritual life, therefore by the diseases which the Lord healed, is signified liberation from the various kinds of evil and the false, which infested the church and the human race, and which would have induced spiritual death; for Divine miracles are distinguished from other miracles by this, that they involve and have respect to states of the church and heavenly kingdom. On this account the Lord's miracles consisted principally in the healing of diseases. This is meant by the Lord's words
