9. The teaching about charity, that is, how to live, was the chief teaching in the ancient churches. That teaching united all churches and so made one out of many. For they recognised as members of the church all those whose lives showed the good of charity and called them brothers, however much otherwise they differed in truths, what are to-day called matters of faith. One taught another about truths, and this was one of their charitable deeds. Also they did not take it amiss, if one failed to accept another's point of view, knowing that each person accepts truth only to the extent that he is in a state of good. Since the ancient churches were of this kind their members were therefore 'interior' people; and for this reason they were wiser. For those who possess the good of love and charity are in heaven, so far as their internal man is concerned; and in this manner belong to a community of angels there which enjoys a like good. This has the effect of raising their minds to more inward matters, and this consequently gives them wisdom. Wisdom can come from nowhere except out of heaven, that is, through heaven from the Lord. Wisdom exists in heaven, because people there are in a state of good. Wisdom is seeing the truth by the light of truth, and the light of truth is the light heaven enjoys. But this wisdom of the ancients declined with the passage of time; for the more the human race withdrew from the good of love to the Lord and of love towards the neighbour, the love called charity, the more it also withdrew from wisdom, because it withdrew further from heaven. Thus it is that man from internal became successively more and more external. And when he became external, he also became worldly and concerned with the body. When a person is like that, he pays little heed to the matters which have to do with heaven, for he is then totally in the grip of the pleasures of earthly loves, as well as of the evils which are rendered attractive by those loves. Then what he hears about life after death, about heaven and hell, in short about spiritual matters, are as it were outside him, and not inside as they ought to be. This too is the reason why the teaching about charity, which was so highly prized by the ancients, is to-day one of the things which have been lost to view. Is there anyone to-day who knows what is the real meaning of charity, and what the real meaning of the neighbour? Yet that teaching not only teaches this, but countless things in addition, of which people to-day know less than a thousandth part. The whole of the Sacred Scripture is nothing but teaching about love and charity. The Lord too teaches this when He says: