What is the human soul but such a form?
are not all things relating to love and all things relating to wisdom
essentials of that form? and are not these things appertaining to a man
in his soul, and by derivation from the soul in his head and body? You
are called spirits and angels; and in the world you believed that
spirits and angels are like mere wind or ether, and thus mere mind and
animation; and now you see clearly that you are truly, really, and
actually men, who, during your abode in the world, lived and thought in
a material body, and knew that a material body does not live and think,
but a spiritual substance in that body; and this substance you called
the soul, whose form you then were ignorant of, but now have seen and
continue to see. You all are souls, of whose immortality you have heard,
thought, said, and written so much; and because you are forms of love
and wisdom from God, you can never die. The soul therefore is a human
form, from which the smallest thing cannot be taken away, and to which
the smallest thing cannot be added; and it is the inmost of all the
forms of the whole body: and since the forms which are without receive
from the inmost both essence and form, therefore you are souls, as you
appear to yourselves and to us: in a word, the soul is the very man
himself, because it is the inmost man; therefore its form is fully and
perfectly the human form: nevertheless it is not life, but the proximate
receptacle of life from God, and thereby the habitation of God.
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