om thought, and can act only from volition. When the life of the
thoughts and of the will is infected with craft, cunning, and violence,
it must needs be that these, as interior evils of the life, will flow
into the speech and actions pertaining to worship and piety, and defile
them as filth defiles waters.

This worship is what is meant by "Gog and Magog" (Apoc. xx. 8), and is
thus described in Isaiah:

"What is the multitude of sacrifices unto Me, meat offerings, incense,
sabbaths, new moons, appointed feasts, and prayers, when your hands are
full of bloods? Wash you, make you clean, put away the wickedness of
your doings . . . ; cease to do evil" (i. 11-19).

This kind of profanation is not hypocritical like the former, because
the man who is in it believes that he will be saved by external worship
separate from internal, and does not know that the worship by which he
can be saved is external worship from internal. (A.E., n. 1061.)

Those who give themselves up wholly to a life of piety, who walk
continually in pious meditations, who pray frequently upon their knees,
and talk about salvation, faith, and love at all times and in all
places, and yet do not shun frauds, adulteries, hatreds, blasphemies,
and the like, as sins against God, nor fight against them, such are the
kind that are more fully profaners; for by the impurities of their minds
they defile the piety of their lips, especially when they renounce the
world and lead solitary lives. Of this kind there are some who are
still more profaners; these are like those just described, but by
reasonings and by the Word falsely interpreted they defend their vices
as adulteries and lusts that belong to their nature, and thus to their
enjoyment. Such first regard themselves as free from danger, afterward
as blameless, and at length as holy; and thus under the veil of sanctity
they cast themselves into uncleannesses with which both themselves and
their garments are polluted. (A.E., n. 1062.)

To this class of profaners those especially belong who read the Word and
know about the Lord; because from the Lord through the Word are all
things holy that can be profaned; things not from that source cannot be
profaned. That is said to be profane that is the opposite of what is
holy, and that offers violence to what is holy and destroys it. From
this it follows that those who do not read the Word and do not approach
the Lord, as is the case with the Papists, still le