494. It needs to be appreciated that the spiritual ideas of the Word and the church, which a person is impelled by love to absorb and which his understanding supports, last in a person in a way which social and political ideas do not. This is because spiritual ideas rise to the highest level of the mind and take on a form there. The reason is that this is where the Lord enters bringing a person various kinds of Divine truth and good, so that this is a kind of temple for Him to live in. Social and political ideas, being worldly, occupy the lower levels of the mind; some of them there serve as chapels outside the main temple, others, as fore-courts leading to the entrance. Another reason why the church's spiritual ideas reside in the highest levels of the mind is that they are peculiar to the soul, seeking its everlasting life; and the soul is at the highest level, feeding upon nothing but spiritual kinds of food. That is why the Lord calls Himself bread, when He says:
I am the living bread which came down from heaven; if anyone eats of this bread, he will live for ever. John 6:51.
This region is also the seat of a person's love, and this is what makes him blessed after death; there too is the chief residence of his free will in spiritual matters, and from this source comes all the freedom a person has in natural matters. This being its source, it is in communication with all acts of free will in natural matters, and by their means the love that is dominant at the highest level attracts everything which is of use to it. This communication is like that between the force of a spring and the waters that flow from it, or between the reproductive principle of a seed and every part of a tree, especially its fruits, because in them it renews itself. If, however, anyone denies the existence of free will in spiritual matters, and takes it away from them, he makes for himself another spring and opens up a channel to that, changing spiritual freedom into purely natural freedom, and eventually into the freedom of hell. This sort of freedom too resembles the reproductive principle of a seed; it passes freely through the trunk and branches to reach the fruits, which are so teeming with it that they are rotten inside.
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