abuse of
those faculties. The Lord resides in those faculties in everyone by the
influx of His will, namely, to be received by man and to have an abode
with him, and to give him the felicities of eternal life; all this is of
the Lord's will, being of His divine love. It is this will of the Lord
which causes what a man thinks, speaks, wills and does, to seem to be his
own.

[6] That the influx of the Lord's will effects this can be confirmed by
much in the spiritual world. Sometimes the Lord fills an angel with His
divine so that the angel does not know but that he is the Lord. Thus
inspired were the angels who appeared to Abraham, Hagar, and Gideon, and
who therefore spoke of themselves as Jehovah; of whom the Word tells. So
also one spirit may be filled by another so that he does not know but
that he is the other; I have seen this often. In heaven it is general
knowledge that the Lord operates all things by willing, and that what He
wills takes place.

From all this it is plain that it is by those two faculties that the Lord
conjoins Himself to man and causes the man to be reciprocally conjoined.
We told above and shall say more below about how man is reciprocally
conjoined by the two faculties and how, consequently, he is reformed and
regenerated by means of them.

[7] _Without those two faculties man would not have immortality or
eternal life._ This follows from what has been said: that by the two
faculties there is conjunction with the Lord and also reformation and
regeneration. By conjunction man has immortality, and through reformation
and regeneration he has eternal life. As every man, evil as well as good,
is conjoined to the Lord by the two faculties every man has immortality.
Eternal life, or the life of heaven, however, only that man has with whom
there is reciprocal conjunction from inmosts to outmosts.

The reasons may now be clear why the Lord, in all the procedure of His
divine providence, safeguards the two faculties in man unimpaired and as
sacred.

97. ( viii) _It is therefore [a law] of divine providence that man shall
act in freedom from reason._ To act in freedom according to reason, to
act from liberty and rationality, and to act from will and understanding,
are the same. But it is one thing to act in freedom according to reason,
or from liberty and rationality, and another thing to act from freedom
itself according to reason itself or from liberty and rationality
themselves. The man who does