18. The Divine of the Lord in heaven is love, for the reason that love is receptive of all things of heaven, such as peace, intelligence, wisdom and happiness. For love is receptive of each and all things that are in harmony with it; it longs for them, seeks them, and drinks them in as it were spontaneously, for it desires unceasingly to be enriched and perfected by them.# This, too, man well knows, for with him love searches as it were the stores of his memory and draws forth all things that are in accord with itself, collecting and arranging them in and under itself-in itself that they may be its own, and under itself that they may be its servants; but other things not in accord with it it discards and expels. That there is present in love every capacity for receiving truths in harmony with itself, and a longing to conjoin them to itself, has been made clear also by the fact that some who were simple-minded in the world were taken up into heaven, and yet when they were with the angels they came into angelic wisdom and heavenly blessedness, and for the reason that they had loved what is good and true for its own sake, and had implanted it in their life, and had thereby become capacities for receiving heaven with all that is ineffable there. But those who are in love of self and of the world have no capacity for receiving what is good and true; they loathe and reject it, and at its first touch and entrance they flee and associate themselves with those in hell who are in loves like their own. There were spirits who had doubts about there being such capacities in heavenly love, and who wished to know whether it were true; whereupon they were let into a state of heavenly love, whatever opposed being for the time removed, and were brought forward some distance, where there was an angelic heaven, and from it they talked with me, saying that they perceived a more interior happiness than they could possibly express in words, and they lamented greatly that they must return into their former state. Others also were taken up into heaven; and the higher or more interiorly they were exalted the more of intelligence and wisdom were they admitted into, such as enabled them to perceive what had before been incomprehensible to them. From this it is clear that the love that goes forth from the Lord is receptive of heaven and all things therein. # Innumerable things are contained in love, and love gathers to itself all things that are in harmony with it (n. 2500, 2572, 3078, 3189, 6323, 7490, 7750).