692. [verse 9] 'And men were scorched with the great heat, and blasphemed the Name of God having authority over these plagues' signifies that, on account of the delight of the love of self arising from the grievous lusts of evils, they did not acknowledge the Divinity of the Lord's Human, from which nevertheless every good of love and truth of faith inflows. By 'heat' the lusts of evils are signified, which are in the love of self and its delight (n. 382, 691). Consequently by 'to scorch with great heat' is signified to be in grievous lusts, and thus in a delight of love. By 'to blaspheme the Name of God' is signified to deny or not to acknowledge the Divinity of the Lord's Human, nor the holiness of the Word (n. 571, 582). 'To blaspheme' is to deny or not to acknowledge, and 'the Name of God' is the Lord's Divine Human and at the same time the Word (n. 584). By 'to have authority over plagues' is signified that everything good and true of faith by means of which evils and untruths are removed inflows from Him (n. 673, 680, 690). And because the seven angels having the seven plagues went out of the temple of the tabernacle of the testimony (Rev. xv 5, 6), and by 'the temple of the tabernacle of the testimony' is signified the inmost of heaven where the Lord is in His holiness in the Word and in the Law which is the Decalogue (n. 669), and the influx that is signified by 'to pour out the plagues' was produced therefrom (n. 676), it may be established that by 'God having authority over the plagues' is understood the Lord from Whom [the influx is]. [2] A few things shall be said as to what the love of self is like. Its delight exceeds every delight in the world, for it is a fusion of nothing but the lusts of evils, and every single lust breathes out its own delight. Every man is born into this delight; and because it urges a man's mind to be continually thinking about himself, it draws it away from thinking of God and the neighbour except from self and concerning self. Therefore if God should not favour his lusts he is angry with God, just as he is angry with the neighbour who does not favour them. When this delight increases it renders the man unable to think above himself, but only below himself, for he immerses his mind in the proprium of his body. As a result the man becomes sensual by successive stages, and a sensual man speaks in a high and lofty tone of worldly and civil matters, but of God and things Divine he can only speak from memory. If the part he plays in the world is in civil affairs (si persona civilis est), he acknowledges nature as the creatress, and his proprial prudence as the directress, and God he denies. If the man is a priest he speaks of God and things Divine from memory, even with a high and lofty tone, but at heart he has little belief in them.