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THE SWEDENBORG LIBRARY.

of the life, and that faith may exist without life. This is not faith, but mere knowledge residing without the man in his memory, and not within him in his life.

Such faith (so called) is merely historical faith, which is that of one man in another, and is dead until he who possesses it sees for himself that what he has thus imbibed is true; which first takes place when he wills and does the truth. When that heresy prevails, then charity which is the good of life, is annihilated, and at length is rejected as non-essential to salvation. This was represented by Cain's slaying his brother Abel; for faith and charity, or the truth of faith and the good of charity, are called brethren in the Word, as remarked above. (A. E. 427.)


HOW FAITH IS EXALTED.

Because faith in its essence is truth, it follows that it becomes more and more perfectly spiritual, thus less and less sensual-natural, according to the abundance and coherence of truths; for it is exalted into a higher region of the mind, whence it sees under it numerous confirmations of itself in the nature of the world.

True faith, by a copious store of truths cohering as it were in a bundle, also becomes more luminous, more perceptible, more evident and more clear. It also becomes more capable of being conjoined with the goods of charity, and thence of being alienated from evils; and successively more removed from the allurements of

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