r in which they were presented.

First: _In every evil there are innumerable things._ To man's sight an
evil appears to be a single thing. Hatred does, and revenge, theft and
fraud, adultery and whoredom, pride and presumption, and the rest. It is
unknown that in every evil there are innumerable things, exceeding in
number the fibres and vessels in the human body. For an evil man is a
hell in least form, and hell consists of myriads and myriads of spirits,
each of whom is in form like a man, but a monstrous one, in whom all the
fibres and vessels are inverted. A spirit himself is an evil which
appears to him as one thing, but in it are innumerable things, as
numerous as the lusts of that evil. For everyone, from head to foot, is
his own evil or his own good. Since an evil man is such, plainly he is
one evil composed of countless different evils, all severally evils, and
called lusts of evil. It follows that all these, one after another, must
be cured and changed by the Lord for man to be reformed, and that it can
be done only by the Lord's divine providence, step by step from man's
first years to his last.

[2] Every lust of evil, when it is visually presented, appears in hell
like some noxious creature, a serpent, a cockatrice, a viper, a horned
owl, a screech-owl, or some other; so do the lusts of evil in an evil man
appear when he is viewed by angels. All these forms of lust must be
changed one by one. The man himself, who appears as to his spirit like a
monstrous man or devil, must be changed to appear like a comely angel,
and each lust of evil changed to appear like a lamb or sheep or pigeon or
turtle dove, as affections of good in angels appear in heaven when they
are visually represented. Changing a serpent into a lamb, or a cockatrice
into a sheep, or an owl into a dove, can be done only gradually, by
uprooting evil together with its seed and implanting good seed in its
place. This can only be done, however, comparatively as is done in the
grafting of trees, of which the roots with some of the trunk remain, but
the engrafted branch turns the sap drawn through the old root into sap
that produces good fruit. The branch to be engrafted in this instance is
to be had only from the Lord, who is the tree of life; this is also in
keeping with the Lord's words in John 15:1-7.

[3] Second: _An evil man from himself continually leads himself more
deeply into his evils._ He does so "from himself" because all evil is
from