spiritual idea of such persons was like their natural idea, and it was
found not to be so with those who acknowledge the Lord interiorly as God
of heaven and earth. I heard a certain elder from the Christians say that
no one can have an idea of a Human Divine; and I saw him taken about to
various Gentile nations, and successively to such as were more and more
interior, and from them to their heavens, and finally to the Christian
heaven; and everywhere their interior perception concerning God was
communicated to him, and he observed that they had no other idea of God
than that He is a man, which is the same as the idea of a Human Divine
(C.L.J. n. 74).

12. The common people in Christendom have an idea that God is a Man,
because God in the Athanasian doctrine of the Trinity is called a
"Person." But those who are more learned than the common people pronounce
God to be invisible; and this for the reason that they cannot comprehend
how God, as a Man, could have created heaven and earth, and then fill the
universe with His presence, and many things besides, which cannot enter
the understanding so long as the truth that the Divine is not in space
is ignored. Those, however, who go to the Lord alone think of a Human
Divine, thus of God as a Man.

13. How important it is to have a correct idea of God can be known from
the truth that the idea of God constitutes the inmost of thought with
all who have religion, for all things of religion and all things of
worship look to God. And since God, universally and in particular, is
in all things of religion and of worship, without a proper idea of God
no communication with the heavens is possible. From this it is that in
the spiritual world every nation has its place allotted in accordance
with its idea of God as a Man; for in this idea, and in no other, is the
idea of the Lord. That man's state of life after death is according to