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Let us continue with selections from “Divine Providence,” where Emanuel Swedenborg (vegetarian) expounds on how our wisdom comes from the Lord and how we become happier when we are closer to the Lord.“No one who is in the pleasures of the lusts of evil can know anything of the joys of the affections of good in which the angelic Heaven is. These pleasures and joys are opposites in internals and hence inwardly in externals, though superficially they may differ little.” “For the understanding sees only and sees what is of wisdom or truth, but not what is of love or good. Those felicities are therefore inexpressible, but still, they ascend in like degree with wisdom. They are infinitely various, and each is ineffable. I have heard this, also perceived it. These felicities enter when a person, of themself and yet from the Lord, casts out the lusts of the love of evil and falsity.” “There is no comparing the joys of the lusts of evil and the joys of the affections of good. Inwardly in the former is the devil, in the latter the Lord For, corresponding uncleannesses affect the evil, and corresponding cleannesses the good. Plainly, then, the more closely one is conjoined with the Lord the happier one is.”“There is infernal freedom, and there is heavenly freedom. Thinking and willing evil and also speaking and doing it so far as civil and moral laws do not prevent, is from infernal freedom. But thinking and willing good and speaking and doing it so far as opportunity offers, is from heavenly freedom.”“For to be led by good is to be led by the Lord, but to be led by evil is to be led by the devil. In as much as all they do in freedom appears to a person to be their own, coming as it does from what their love, and to act from one’s love, as was said, is to act freely, it follows that conjunction with the Lord causes a person to seem free and also their own, and the more closely they are conjoined to the Lord, to seem so much freer and so much more their own.”
