57. 3. Genuine truth, of which doctrine ought to consist, is apparent in the Word’s literal sense only to people who are enlightened by the Lord. Enlightenment comes from the Lord alone, and it is found in people who love truths because they are true and apply them to useful life endeavors. Enlightenment in the Word is not found in others.

Enlightenment comes from the Lord alone because the Lord is present everywhere in the Word. The reason enlightenment is found in people who love truths because they are true and apply them to useful life endeavors is that they are in the Lord and have the Lord in them. For the Lord embodies His Divine truth. When this truth is loved because it is Divine truth — and it is loved when it is applied to useful endeavor — then the Lord is present in the person in that truth.

This, too, the Lord teaches in John:

In that day you will know that...you (are) in Me, and I in you. He who has My commandments and keeps them, is he who loves Me.... ...and I will love him and manifest Myself to him...and (I) will come to him and make (My) home with him. (John 14:20-21, 23)

And in Matthew:

Blessed are the pure in heart, for they shall see God. (Matthew 5:8)

These are the people who are enlightened when they read the Word, and with whom the Word shines and is translucent.

105. We need to explain, however, how the presence of the Lord and heaven and conjunction with them is possible in all lands by means of the Word.

The whole of heaven is, in the Lord’s sight, like a single person. So, too, the church. To be shown that it also actually appears as a person, see the book Heaven and Hell 59-86.

In that person, the church where the Word is read, and where the Lord is consequently known, is like the heart and lungs — the celestial kingdom being as though the heart, and the spiritual kingdom the lungs.

[2] As the heart and lungs are the two founts of life in the human body, and all the rest of the organs and viscera subsist and have life from them, so also do all people in the world subsist and have life from the conjunction of the Lord and heaven with the church through the Word — all those who have any religion, who worship one God and live rightly, who are therefore included in that grand humanity, and who relate to its organs and viscera surrounding the thoracic cavity which contains the heart and lungs. For the Word in the church, even if possessed by relatively few, is life to all the rest from the Lord through heaven, as the organs and viscera of the entire body have life from the heart and lungs. They also have a similar communication.

[3] This, too, is the reason that Christians among whom the Word is read constitute the breast of that grand humanity. They are also at the center of all, with Roman Catholics round about them. Around them are Muslims who acknowledge the Lord as a very great prophet and as the Son of God. After them come Africans. And the outmost periphery is composed of nations and peoples from Asia and the Indies. Regarding the arrangement of these peoples, something more may be seen in the short work The Last Judgment 48.

All those who are in that grand humanity also face toward the middle where the Christians are.