They were two married partners from heaven, and they accosted
me; and because I was musing on what I had just seen, they inquired,
"What did you see?" And when I told them that at first they appeared to
me as naked infants, afterwards as infants decorated with garlands, and
lastly as grown up persons in embroidered garments, and that instantly I
experienced a vernal warmth with its delights, they smiled pleasantly,
and said, "In the way we did not seem to ourselves as infants, or naked,
or adorned with garlands, but constantly in the same appearance which we
now have: thus at a distance was represented our conjugial love; its
state of innocence by our seeming like naked infants, its delights by
garlands, and the same delights now by our cloaks and tunics being
embroidered with flowers; and as you said that, as we approached, a
vernal warmth breathed on you, attended with its pleasant fragrance as
from a garden, we will explain to you the reason of all this." They
said, "We have now been married partners for ages, and constantly in the
prime of our age in which you now see us: our first state was like the
first state of a virgin and a youth, when they enter into consociation
by marriage; and we then believed, that this state was the very
essential blessedness of our life; but we were informed by others in our
heaven, and have since perceived ourselves, that this was a state of
heat not tempered by light; and that it is successively tempered, in
proportion as the husband is perfected in wisdom, and the wife loves
that wisdom in the husband; and that this is effected by and according
to the uses which each, by mutual aid, affords to society; also that
delights succeed according to the temperature of heat and light; or of
wisdom and its love.
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