Page:The Swedenborg Library Vol 3.djvu/50

appropriated can be eradicated; because it becomes a part of both his love and reason, or of both his will and understanding, and consequently part of his life. It may be removed, indeed, but cannot be wholly ejected; and when it is removed, it is as if transferred from the centre to the circumference, and there it stays. This is meant by its remaining.

For example: If a man has in boyhood or youth appropriated to himself certain evils by practising them from his love's delight, as fraud, blasphemy, revenge, fornication; then, as he had practised them from freedom according to thought, he has also appropriated them. But if he afterwards repents, shuns these evils, and regards them as sins which ought to be held in aversion, and thus from freedom according to reason abstains from them, he then appropriates to himself the good which is opposed to those evils. This good then becomes central, and removes the evils towards the circumference, further and further according as the man dislikes and turns away from them. But yet they cannot be so utterly ejected as to be called extirpated, although by this removal they may seem to be so. This is because the man is withheld from evil by the Lord, and kept in good; this takes place with all hereditary evil, and in like manner with all of man's actual evil.

This I have even seen proved by the experience of some in heaven, who, because they were kept in good by the Lord, thought themselves free from evil. But lest they should believe that the good in which they