understood. 'There exist,' says Swedenborg ('Celestial Doctrine' 26),
'innumerable Arcana within the hidden meaning of the Correspondences.
Thus the men who scoff at the books of the Prophets where the Word is
enshrined are as densely ignorant as those other men who know nothing
of a science and yet ridicule its truths. To know the Correspondences
which exist between the things visible and ponderable in the
terrestrial world and the things invisible and imponderable in the
spiritual world, is to hold heaven within our comprehension. All the
objects of the manifold creations having emanated from God necessarily
enfold a hidden meaning; according, indeed, to the grand thought of
Isaiah, 'The earth is a garment.'

"This mysterious link between Heaven and the smallest atoms of created
matter constitutes what Swedenborg calls a Celestial Arcanum, and his
treatise on the 'Celestial Arcana' in which he explains the
correspondences or significances of the Natural with, and to, the
Spiritual, giving, to use the words of Jacob Boehm, the sign and seal
of all things, occupies not less than sixteen volumes containing
thirty thousand propositions. 'This marvellous knowledge of
Correspondences which the goodness of God granted to Swedenborg,' says
one of his disciples, 'is the secret of the interest which draws men
to his works. According to him, all things are derived from heaven,
all things lead back to heaven. His writings are sublime and clear; he
speaks in heaven, and earth hears him. Take one of his sentences by
itself and a volume could be made of it'; and the disciple quotes the
following passages taken from a thousand others that would answer the
same purpose.

"'The kingdom of heaven,' says Swedenborg ('Celestial Arcana'), 'is
the kingdom of motives. _Action_ is born in heaven, thence into the