DLife 108-110 - shunning evils because they are sins

If Any One Shuns Evils for Any Other Reason

Than Because They Are Sins,

He Does Not Shun Them,

But Merely Prevents Them

From Appearing Before the World

D Life 108-110

There are moral people who keep the commandments

of the second table of the Decalogue,

not committing fraud, blasphemy, revenge, or adultery;

and such of them as confirm themselves

in the belief that such things are evils

because they are injurious to the public well-being,

and are therefore contrary

to the laws of humane conduct,

also practice charity, sincerity, justice, chastity.

But if they do these goods

and shun those evils

merely because they are evils,

and not at the same time because they are sins,

they are still merely natural men,

and with the merely natural

the root of evil remains imbedded

and is not dislodged;

for which reason the goods they do are not goods,

because they are from themselves.

Before mankind, a natural moral person

may appear exactly like a spiritual moral man,

but not before the angels.

Before the angels in heaven,

if he is in goods he appears like an image of wood,

if in truths like an image of marble, lifeless,

and very different from a spiritual moral man.

For a natural moral man is an outwardly moral man,

and a spiritual moral man is an inwardly moral man,

and what is outward

without what is inward

is lifeless.

It does indeed live,

but not the life that is called life.

The lusts of evil,

which form the interiors of a person from his birth,

are not removed except by the Lord alone.

For the Lord flows in

from the spiritual into the natural,

but a person from himself

flows from the natural into the spiritual.

Now this, influx is contrary to order,

and does not operate upon lusts to their removal,

but shuts them in more and more closely

as it establishes itself.

Further, since hereditary evil, thus shut in,

remains concealed, therefore after death,

when a person becomes a spirit,

it bursts the covering in which it had been hidden,

and breaks forth

as a corrupt discharge from an ulcer

that had only been superficially healed.