Psalm XIV

Verse 7. " Oh that the Salvation of Israel were come out of Zion! when the Lord bringeth back the captivity of His people, Jacob shall rejoice and Israel shall be glad." Zion pre-eminently signifies the Lord's Divine Love, and from this love, as an effect of it, the Salvation of Israel, or the Divine Truth, comes forth for the salvation of the church. But this coming forth was His manifestation to the natural mind, and representatively to the bodily senses. Hence Zion, in its subordinate sense, signifies love to the Lord, and from this love He must come forth, or else He cannot be the Salvation of Israel. Without the life of love there can be no light of truth except merely as science in the memory; and hence, with those whose deeds, that is, spiritually speaking, whose intentions were evil, there could be no love for that Light which brought the Divine Goodness forth to view. Let us be careful not to think that the Divine Truth, in its representative form, existed separate from human minds, but always bear in our recollections this definition of it, that it is the Divine Human Form under which the Infinite Esse, in Himself incomprehensible and therefore unapproachable, because He is Infinite, appears to the finite mind ; and that, in consequence of the various degrees and states of finite recipiency, "the Divine Truth is various, though the Divine Goodness is one." That same Divine Truth, which, while it appeared to man in nature, was the Lord and Saviour Jesus Christ, was presented in a form, and by circumstances, which represented all the states of the church, that is, of their wills and intellects, relatively to the Divine Truth. He came down from heaven, the heaven of state, into the natural mind, and so into the region of sensual life ; and therefore the Jews treated Him in a way which exactly represented their interior rejection of the Divine Truth, because it was an outbirth from it. To separate the outward form from the interior essence would be to make all the events of the Lord's life, recorded in the Gospels, a mere illusion, instead of being real by connection with their spiritual causes.