3654. CONCERNING REGENERATION. Man knows not how he comes into the faculty of thinking and speaking, in which are things so wonderful, that they can never be explained to a ten thousandth part; nor does he know whence this faculty is, or what is its nature; yea, so great is man's ignorance of it, that he scarcely known that he has it, and that by it he is distinguished from the brutes. Man knows not how the lungs and their respiration are ordered, so that they concur to all and singular of their minutest functions, and to all and singular of the smallest particulars of the speech and voice, nor does he even know that the fact is so. Again, he does not know how respiration concurs to each of the ideas of thought; neither how the tongue is initiated into each of the minor motions necessary to the process of eating, of speaking, and of articulating sounds; besides innumerable other things - and yet he would inquire into the manner in which the Lord regenerates man, when this is interior, and still more interior, and thus most remote from his ideas of thought. It may thence be safely concluded that regeneration takes place from the Lord unconsciously to man, since the design of it is, that he may become a new man. - 1748, October 22.