likened to waters flowing from an impure fountain, which one cannot
drink. While a man is such that he thinks about heaven and God from
religion but gives no thought to evils as sins, he is still in the first
state. He comes into the second state, which is one of reformation, when
he begins to think that there is such a thing as sin and still more when
he thinks that a given evil is a sin, explores it somewhat in himself,
and does not will it.

[6] Man's third state, which is one of regeneration, sets in and
continues from the former. It begins when a man desists from evils as
sins, progresses as he shuns them, and is perfected as he battles against
them. Then as he conquers from the Lord he is regenerated. The order of
his life is changed; from natural he becomes spiritual; the natural
separated from the spiritual is in disorder and the spiritual is in
order. The regenerated man acts from charity and makes what is of his
faith a part of his charity. But he becomes spiritual only in the measure
in which he is in truths. Everyone is regenerated by means of truths and
of a life in accord with them; by truths he knows life and by his life he
does the truths. So he unites good and truth, which is the spiritual
marriage in which heaven is.

85.* Man is reformed and regenerated by means of the two faculties called
rationality and liberty, and cannot be reformed or regenerated without
them, because it is by means of rationality that he can understand and
know what is evil and what is good, and hence what is false and true, and
by means of liberty that he can will what he understands and knows. But
while the enjoyment of an evil love rules him he cannot will good and
truth freely or make them a matter of his reason, and therefore cannot
appropriate them to him. For, as was shown above, what a man does in
freedom from reason is appropriated to him as his, and unless it is so