ness that exists on earth or in hell. "Evil," says the Doctrine of the New Church, "is all that which is contrary to Divine order;"[1] and as Divine order is the source of all the joy of heaven, because thereby man is formed into the likeness of his Maker, who is Order itself and Joy itself,—consequently, evil, being that which opposes and disturbs Divine order, is the one source of all that is contrary to joy and happiness, and therefore the one great curse to be delivered from.
But yet, unhappily, we are full of this curse; human nature, as inherited at the present day from parents and ancestors, is, as Revelation declares, one mass of evils. "The heart of man," says the Scripture, "is deceitful above all things, and desperately wicked."[2]—"That every man," says the New Church Doctrine, "has hereditary evil, and that thus he is in the inclination to many evils, is well known in the Church. Thence it is, that a man from himself cannot do good; for evil does not do good, except it be such good as has evil lurking within it; which evil consists in his doing good for the sake of self, and thus doing what is good only in appearance. That this evil is inherited from parents is well known. It is said to be from Adam and Eve, but this is a mistake: every one is born into it from his own parent, that parent from his parent, and so on; and thus it is successively transferred from one to another, by which it is vastly increased and augmented, and is transmitted to posterity. Thence it is, that in man there is no health, that is, nothing sound; but he is one entire mass of evil. Who is there, for instance,
- ↑ Divine Providence, n. 279.
- ↑ Jeremiah xvii. 9.
