4733. 'And said, Let us not strike him, [as to his] soul' means that it must not be annihilated because it is the life of religion. This is clear from the meaning of 'striking' as annihilating, and from the meaning of 'soul' as life, dealt with in 1000, 1005,1436, 1742, in this case the life of religion. It is evident that the acknowledgement and worship of the Lord's Divine Human constitutes the life of religion from what has been stated just above in 4731, and also from the fact that people's disposition is such that they wish to worship One of whom, by the use of their perception and thought, they can form some mental idea, or - in the case of those who are ruled by their senses - One of whom they can have some sensory image. Nor do they wish to worship Him unless the Divine is present within Him. This is a common feature throughout the human race. Consequently gentiles worship idols in which, they believe, One who is Divine is present, while others worship people that have died whom they believe to be gods or else saints. For nothing can be stimulated in man unless there is something to bring his senses into play.
[2] The majority of those who say that they acknowledge a supreme being, but of whom they have no mental picture, do not acknowledge any God, but nature instead, which they acknowledge because they have a mental grasp of what this is. Very many learned persons among Christians are like this, and for the added reason that they do not believe that the Lord's Human is Divine. Therefore to withhold from the worship of wood and stones those people who have set themselves far apart from the Divine and have become bodily-minded; to withhold them also from the worship of anyone after his death and so of some devil within this person, instead of the worship of God Himself because they could not perceive Him in any way; thus to withhold everything of the Church from destruction, and the human race along with the Church, the Divine was willing to take the Human upon Himself and make this Divine. Let the learned beware therefore of thinking of the Lord's Human without at the same time believing that this is Divine. Otherwise they set themselves a stumbling-block and at length believe nothing.
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