1790. CONCERNING THE LORD'S PRAYER. When the Lord's Prayer, which comprehends all celestial and spiritual things, is read, there may be infused into each particular so many things, that heaven itself shall not be capable of comprehending them, and that, too, according to the capacity and use of everyone. The more internally and intimately anyone penetrates, the more fully or abundantly the things of heaven are understood; by those in lower states they are not comprehended, but are a kind of arcana to them, some being comprehensible solely by an intellectual faith, and some being ineffable: celestial ideas which all emanate from the Lord, the lower they descend, or the lower the character of the men [to whom they come], the more complete appears the closing up [of the mind], till at length a certain hardness ensues in which there is little or nothing besides the sense of the letter or the ideas of the words; whence it was given to know, from the Lord's Prayer, what kind of souls they had been in the life of the body, as to the doctrine of their faith, inasmuch as it was granted to them to have their former sense [of these things] when offering prayer. - 1748, April 1. Thus it is that the idea expands upwardly or inwardly from corporeal things, and indeed to indefinite extent in every degree, or in other words, through indefinitely multiplied expansions in the interiors, and so in the more interior parts, and in the inmosts.