211. [213.] 73. There was a certain Englishman who wrote learnedly and knowledgeably regarding faith and charity, and this with a great deal of ingenuity, but who had concluded that faith produces charity, believing that when a person has been justified by faith he endeavors to do good, this being the effect of faith, consequently that faith leads first to charity and also afterward in a state of charity. He was told by angels that this is how it appears to a person, but that it is nevertheless not so; yet that because this is how it appears, it is the way of reformation, for in consequence a person learns many things that will be matters of faith, believing that thus he will be saved. But when a person is being regenerated, the order is then reversed; and if one is willing to investigate, they said, one never finds charity to be produced by faith, but faith produced as a result of charity. Consequently the Englishman, being endowed with great ingenuity, thought up numerous arguments to establish that faith does the producing, and he was given an opportunity to set forth these arguments and to show whether it was so. For that reason he was left to meditate on his arguments; but when he came at the end of each to the production of charity, a kind of veil always appeared in the way, which he was not able to penetrate so as to arrive at charity. Abandoning that argument therefore, he dealt in like manner with the next, and so on with a hundred; and so he proceeded in his ingenious meditation every day for an entire year, never seeing a conjunction of the two from the standpoint of faith. On that account he afterward confessed that it was not possible, adding that some people said they had sensed in themselves that it was owing either to his having thought of charity as outside of faith or to other causes, and so forth and so on-as for instance, to the fact that he had been informed by such matters as are matters of faith; for truths of faith teach, and a person acts in accordance with them, and people have attributed this to faith as a result of some principle either conceived or heard. Moreover, after a person practices charity, his faith then becomes living, and in every single action faith and charity then operate together, at which point it can hardly be seen what is prior and what is subsequent. Truths of faith which are matters of thought and the intellect exist first; but still truths are not living and do not become matters of a living or saving faith unless and until a person lives according to truths.