The Essential Thing in Religion.
The New Church believes and teaches that love to the Lord and the neighbor is the essential thing in heaven and the church; that the degree of heavenly life, and consequent happiness, in any individual, depends on the degree in which this love is developed or received (for man is only a recipient subject), and the measure of its intensity. Love is life; and the stronger and more disinterested the love, the nobler and more exalted is the life—the nearer does the individual approach to the moral likeness of God himself, and the sweeter and more abundant his spiritual joy.
The great end of all God's dealings with us—the end of all his chastisements as well as his blessings—the end for which He reveals to us the laws of the soul's higher life—is, to develop within us a heavenly character—a pure and unselfish love;—to re-create us in his own Divine likeness.
