47. I. The first state of this church was the appearance of the Lord Jehovih, and the calling and covenanting, and then was its rise or morning. We are taught from the Word, that the Lord Jehovih has appeared at the beginning of each of the four churches of this earth. This is because God is the All in all of the church and its religion; and the acknowledgment of God in it, is like the soul in the body, which vivifies both its interiors and its exteriors; and it is like the prolific element in seed, which, abiding inmostly in all the sap drawn from the earth by the root, accompanies it from the first germination even to the fruit, in which it also is, and it disposes the vegetative process so that it proceeds in its own order. For this reason, the man of the church, without the acknowledgment of God, is in the eyes of the angels a brute like the wild beasts of the forest, or like a bird of night, or like a monster of the sea; yea, without the acknowledgment of God, he is like a tree the branches of which are cut off, and the trunk cut in pieces, and the whole piled up together in a heap reserved for the fire; for the Lord says:
Without Me ye can do nothing; if anyone abide not in Me, he is cast forth as a branch, and is withered; and they gather him, and cast him into the fire, and he is burned (John 15:5-6). Without the acknowledgment of God, man, inwardly, as to his rational things, is like the ruins of a burned city; he is also like food when its nutritiveness is boiled out it becomes refuse. And so forth.
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