Filthy and foul spiritual things are excrement. The ground being fertilized by excrement therefore portrays that they who confess their filthy sins and acknowledge that they are manure, are the kind of ground from which the seed sprouts up. Likewise in the other life, when filthy pleasures such as those of adultery and cruelty rot, and become stinking like manure, so that they begin to abhor them, then they are like a soil in which the propensity for goodness can be sown. This I saw by a spiritual mental image, and spoke of it with spirits, for they had wanted earlier to know what excrement portrays. 1748, 21 July.