"These are the people who looked to you like apes riding backward on fiery red and black horses with the reins around their necks, since people who do not like the church's truth and goodness from the Word also do not wish to look at a horse's foreparts, but at its hindparts. When they hear something regarding living water, namely, the Word's genuine truth, and it enters their ears, they become exceedingly heated and inflamed, and reject it as something that will cause their heads to burst. The interiors of their minds have become comparatively like jars filled with iron filings mixed with powdered sulfur, a mixture which becomes first hot if water is introduced into it, and then bursts into flame, breaking the jar. "Moreover, because they have made themselves such, they do not accept any of the church's genuine truths, nor any of religion's genuine goods. "As a consequence the church's doctrines with them have become ones of the mouth only, and no longer matters of thought in accord with reason, still less matters of their love's affection. And eventually they pushed them aside into the sensual level of their natural mind. Then, because they began to think no more about God and heaven, but about themselves and the world, thus not about eternal bliss and happiness, but about temporal status and wealth, they expelled the doctrines they had learned in their youth from their rational mind's interiors which communicate with heaven and so are in the light of heaven, and retained them only in their rational mind's exteriors which communicate with the world and so are only in the light of the world. But when they advanced to higher offices in the church, they retained what they had learned only for a time. "They learned in their youth to affirm faith alone, a trinity in God, and a duality in Christ. They spoke there with the mouth and lips about the church and religion, but only to gain mastery by means of them. They talked in that place about the church and religion, and yet they had nothing of the church among them, because they lacked any spiritual truth, neither did they have any element of religion, because they lacked any spiritual goodness. To that the angels replied, "They come from the place called in Revelation 16:16 Armageddon, where several thousand of them gathered to fight against people who belong to the Lord's New Church, which is called the New Jerusalem. So I told them that I was seeing the ludicrous display of the horsemen described, and I asked the angels what was going on and who the riders were. Two angels then descended from heaven, and approaching me they said, "What do you see?" They kept crying, moreover, "Let us fight against riders on white horses!" But they kept pulling on the reins with both hands, so that they drew the horses back from battle. The riders looked like apes with their faces and chests facing backward toward the horses' haunches and tails, and the rear of their heads and their backs facing forward toward the horses' necks and heads and the reins hung from the riders' necks. I looked out into the world of spirits and saw an army on fiery red and black horses.
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