Conjugial Love (Rogers) n. 402

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402. (13) A love of little children descends, and does not ascend. In other words, it descends from generation to generation, or from sons and daughters to grandsons and granddaughters, and does not ascend from them to the fathers and mothers of families, as people know. The reason for its increasing as it descends is a love of bearing fruit or producing useful results, and in respect to the human race, a love of proliferating it. This phenomenon, however, takes it origin solely from the Lord, who in the proliferation of the human race looks to the preservation of creation, and, as its final end, to the angelic heaven, which is formed only from the human race. Consequently, because the angelic heaven is in the Lord the principal end and thus His principal love, therefore He has implanted in the souls of people not only a love of procreating, but also of loving the progeny procreated in their successive generations. So it is, too, that this love is found only in man, and not in any animal or bird. The fact that this love in a person descends in increasing measure is owing also to the vainglory of his honor, which likewise grows in him in accordance with enlargements of his issue. We will see under heading (16) below that a love of honor and glory receives into it the love of little children flowing in from the Lord and makes it seemingly an extension of itself.


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