There are outward and inward reasons for this. The outward ones anyone may see. 1. A widow cannot provide herself and her household with the necessities of life, nor can she distribute what she has acquired as her husband could, and as she could previously by means of and together with her husband. 2. Neither can she properly protect herself and her household; for her husband, while she was a wife, was her protector and, so to speak, her right arm. And even when she was her own protector, she still relied upon her husband. 3. Of herself she lacks the power of decision in matters which demand inner wisdom and so prudence. 4. A widow is unable to receive the love which she has as a woman, so that she is in a state removed from her native one and that brought on by marriage.

[2] These outward or natural reasons are derived from inward or spiritual ones, as is everything else in the world and in the body (on this see 220 above).

These outward, natural reasons can be grasped from the inward, spiritual reasons, which arise from the marriage of good and truth, and principally from the following. Good cannot provide for or arrange anything except by means of truth. Neither can good protect itself except by means of truth, so that truth is the protector and, as it were, the right arm of good. Good without truth lacks the ability to decide, because it acquires this ability, wisdom and prudence by means of truth.

[3] Now since a man is by creation truth, and a wife is from creation its good - or to put it differently, since a man is by creation an intellect and wife is from creation the love of it - it is obvious that the outward or natural reasons which make a widow's state distressing derive from inward or spiritual reasons. It is these spiritual reasons which, combined with natural ones, are meant in the Word by what is said in many passages about widows; on these see THE APOCALYPSE REVEALED (764).

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