204. (IV.) As far as anyone does not shun evils as sins, he remains in them. Man was created in the image and in the likeness of God, and so made that he may be a recipient of the Lord's love and wisdom. But, because he was not willing to be a recipient, but desired to be love itself and wisdom itself, and thus as God, he inverted his form, and turned his affections and thoughts from the Lord to himself, and began to love himself more than the Lord, yea, to worship himself. And so he alienated himself from the Lord, and looked back from Him; and in this way he perverted the image and likeness of God in himself, and made it the image and likeness of hell. This is signified by his eating of the tree of the knowledge of good and evil. By the serpent which he obeyed is signified the sensual, which is the ultimate of the natural man, and its cupidities. This sensual of man, because it is extant in the world and receives its objects therefrom, loves the things of the world; and if dominion is given to it, it withdraws the mind from the objects of heaven, which are the goods of love and the truths of wisdom, in themselves Divine. It is from this origin that, as to his proprium, man is nothing but evil, and is born into it from his parents. But means are provided by the Lord that he may not therefore perish; which means are, that he shall look to the Lord and acknowledge that every good of love and every truth of wisdom is from Him, and nothing from himself. He thus converts his form, by turning away from himself and turning to the Lord; and so returns to the state in which he was created, and which consisted, as has been said, in his being a recipient of good and truth from the Lord, and in no wise from himself. And because the proprium of man, by the inversion of it, has become mere evil, the other means of recovering the image of God is to shun evils as sins. For if a man does not shun evils as sins, but only because they are injurious, he does not look to the Lord, but only to himself, and so remains in his perverted state. But when he shuns evils as sins he fights against them because they are contrary to the Lord, and against His Divine laws; and then he prays to the Lord for help and for power to resist them, which power besought is never denied. By these two means a man is purified from the evils that are in him from birth. If therefore he does not embrace these two means he can but remain as he was born. He cannot be purified from evils if he only looks and prays to the Lord; for then after he has prayed he believes that he is entirely without sins, or that they are remitted, by which he understands that they are taken away. And so he still remains in them; and to remain in them is to increase them. For they are like a disease which devours and mortifies all that is around it. Nor are evils removed by only shunning them; for in this way the man looks to himself, and thereby confirms the origin of evil, which was that he turned himself back, away from the Lord, and turned to himself.