holiness. Since the Word is the basis of the heavens, and since the
Word was wholly falsified and adulterated by the Jewish nation by
traditions and adaptation of the sense of the letter to favor their evil
loves, lest the heavens should be endangered and the wisdom of the
angels there should become foolishness it pleased the Lord to come down
from heaven and to put on the Human and to become the Word (as is
evident from John i. 14), and thus to restore the state of heaven.
(A.E., n. 1085.)

There is a successive order and there is a simultaneous order. In
successive order things pure and perfect appear above, and those less
pure and perfect appear below. The three heavens are in successive
order, one above another; and in the higher heavens all things are pure
and perfect, while in the lower they are less pure and perfect.
Simultaneous order exists in lower things, and fully in the lowest; for
higher things let themselves down and place themselves in the order that
is called simultaneous, in which the pure and perfect things, which were
the higher, are in the middle or center, and the less pure and perfect,
which were the lower, are in the circumferences. Therefore all things
that have come forth in successive order are together in outmosts in
their order.

As all higher things place themselves in what is lowest in simultaneous
order, it follows that in the outmosts of the Word, which constitute the
sense of its letter, are all things of Divine truth and of Divine good,
even from their firsts. And as all things of Divine truth and Divine
good are together in their outmost, which is the sense of the letter of
the Word, there evidently is the power of Divine truth, yea, the
omnipotence of the Lord in saving man. For when the Lord operates He
operates not from first things through mediates into outmosts, but from