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n his heart (Mt 5:28).* The same is true of all other evils. * The Greek is simply "on a woman" and does not have the word here rendered "of another." Though Swedenborg quotes the verse several times in his works he seems not to have checked as he usually did beyond the rendering of the Schmidius Latin Bible which he used. 112. From this it may now be evident that for a person to be purified from the lusts of evil, evils must by all means be removed from the external man, for the lusts have no way out before. If no outlet exists, they remain within and breathe out enjoyments and so incite man to consent, thus to deed. Lusts enter the body by the external of thought; when there is consent, therefore, in the external of thought they are instantly in the body; the enjoyment felt is bodily. See in the treatise _Divine Love and Wisdom_ (nn. 362-370) that the body, thus the whole man, is what the mind is. This can be illustrated by comparisons, and by examples. [2] By _comparisons:_ lusts with their enjoyments can be compared to a fire which blazes the more, the more it is nursed; the freer its way the more widely it spreads until in a city it consumes houses and in a woods the trees. In the Word, moreover, lusts are compared to fire, and the evils from them to a conflagration. The lusts of evil with their enjoyments also appear as fires in the spiritual world; hellfire is nothing else. Lusts may also be compared to floods and inundations as dikes or dams give way. They may also be likened to gangrene and abscesses which bring death to the body as they run their course or are not healed. [3] By _examples:_ it is obvious that when evils are not removed in the external man, the lusts with their enjoyments grow and flourish. The more he steals the more a thief lusts to steal until he cannot stop; so with a defrauder, the more he defrauds; it is the same with hatred and vengeance, luxury and intemperance, whoredom and blasphemy. It is notorious that the love of ruling from the love of self increases when left unbridled; so also the love of possessing things from love of the world; they seem to have no limit or end. Plain it is then that so far as evils are not removed in the external man, lusts for them intensify; also that in the degree that evils are given free rein, the lusts increase. 113. A person does not see the lusts of his evil; he sees their enjoyments, to be sure, but still he reflects little on them, for t
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