Page:The Doctrines of the New Church Briefly Explained.djvu/91

our successes and defeats, our relations and intercourse with others, and all the varied discipline of life. By these means the all-loving and merciful One is perpetually working through all our lives, to recreate us in his own Divine likeness, and so to save us with an everlasting salvation—to fill us with his own Spirit and Life. And his life flows into us just in the degree that we deny, overcome, and lose our own hereditary selfish life for his sake; for in that degree we receive or find our true life, agreeably to the Lord's own words: "He that loseth his life for my sake, shall find it;" that is, he shall find a new life far superior and more blissful than the old selfish life he has lost. And the only sure way of attaining this new life, which is the salvation (in different degrees) that the Bible speaks of, is, by shunning all known evils as sins against God.

"To be led away from evils, to be regenerated and thus to be saved," says Swedenborg, "is of mercy which is not immediate, as is believed, but mediate, that is, to those who recede from evils, and thereby admit the truth of faith and the good of love from the Lord into their life. Immediate mercy, or that which would extend to every one from the good pleasure alone of God, is contrary to divine order; and what is contrary to divine order is contrary to God, for order is from God, and his Divine in heaven is order. For any one to receive order in himself is to be saved, which