Page:Swedenborgs Maximus Homo.pdf/15

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healthy, and happy is that community. The more truly human does it become in its form, organization, and activities. It appoints its wiseet and best men to preside over its interests, because every one is aiming to subject himself to the government of the highest good and truth. And so the form or order of that community becomes more and more human. All its corporate acts express more and more faithfully the human thoughts and feelings with which the minds of its individual members are imbued. Such community is in the human form, therefore, just so far as the individual minds composing it are human. It is the tendency of true human life wherever it exists, to mould the collective as well as the individual man into a corresponding human form.

But a consideration of the wonderful mechanism of the human body, and of the mutual relation and dependence of its various parts, will furnish the best idea of the human form, and reveal most clearly the form or order of heaven. For as the body in its entireness corresponds to the soul, so its different parts correspond to the various faculties and functions of the soul, or to the goods and truths of heaven in their various orders and degrees. Therefore the bodily organs correspond to the various societies of which the whole angelic heaven is composed, and which are the living embodiment of these goods and truths.