by neighborly communication of the ways in which we enjoy living, is represented by a milch cow.1 The milk itself is the truth; the butter is the kindliness; the sugar the pleasantness; and the curd is the love of work in it. A mother who is a willing worker, patient, helpful, and contented, desires to train her child to similar helpfulness; she accordingly teaches the child what is useful and practicable, and with her teaching imparts also her kindliness, her love of work, and her pleasure in it. The child interested in learning the mother's ways is spiritually a calf, and grows by the milk of the mother's teaching. So, too, a person coming into a society engaged in useful work, or entering upon a new occupation, desires to know how to help; he needs friendly instruction, such as is represented by milk; his desire for it is spiritually a calf, which learns eagerly, and gambols with delight in his growing powers.

When a society has little regard for spiritual life, and is engaged in doing, not what will minister

I A. C. 2184, and A. R. 242.

to the lasting good of its members and the community, but what is expressively called "having a good time," that is, in obtaining the greatest present pleasure, the desire to be initiated into its knowledge and enjoyments is also represented by a calf, but in a perverted sense. This was the desire of the Israelites, who, while Moses was receiving the Law for them from Jehovah, impatient at the slow fulfilment of the Divine promises, gathered riotously in heathen sports and feasts about a golden calf, which represented the affection which they chose to serve.1

It was said of the Lord representatively, by the prophet Isaiah, "Butter and honey shall he eat, that he may know to refuse the evil and choose the good;" and by butter is meant the kindness and goodness which the Lord in His boyhood would perceive in the instructions of the Word, and by honey the natural pleasantness of learning from It. By this the Lord learned to distinguish good from evil.

Burnt-offerings of calves, bullocks, and heifers were frequent among the ceremonies of the Jewish Church; and by them were represented the continual perception and acknowledgment by spiritual men that the good things represented by these animals are in the Lord, and from Him alone in man.

The Lord received such things in Divine purity and fulness from His Divinity into His Humanity ; and by such reception His Humanity was perfected. In the history of Abraham we have, in the spiritual sense, an account of the growth and spiritual progress of the Lord in His childhood and youth. And therefore it was that when the angels appeared to Abraham, by which was represented the Lord's interior perception of the Divinity within Him, Abraham presented to them butter and milk and the calf which he had dressed; and in that prophetic act was foretold by the Lord the growth in His own Humanity of natural goodness and truth and the affection for them.

In comparing the ox family with sheep and goats, it is worthy of notice that, as they feed

naturally, the kine prefer the ranker grasses of the valleys and lower hill-sides, but the sheep and goats climb the mountains, preferring the sweeter though scantier grasses of their less accessible nooks and slopes. These correspond to truths concerning a state of spiritual elevation, or nearness to the Lord; and the coarser food to truth of good natural life.

All these animals naturally have horns and divided hoofs, and chew the cud; and because of their divided hoofs and ruminating habit they were by the Levitical Law clean for food and fit for sacrifices. Their horns represent the truth by which good loves defend themselves, and which they desire others to obey. They are truths of experience which grow from their own life, and which they are ready to maintain as fixed and certain.

Hoofs are of similar material, formed to take hold of the ground and support the animal as it stands, walks, or runs. They represent the hold we have from our own experience upon facts and natural truth. If we desire to do good to another, we must be sure of our footing as we approach; there must

be common facts and natural principles which we can stand upon; if these fail, we are brought to a stand; or if we have been hurt by them, or are morbidly sensitive to them, we advance lamely.

A solid hoof, as of a horse or ass, desires only to know what is sound and right; this it strikes with a blow and bounds on. A divided hoof is itself more tender, it presses more lightly and carefully, and feels each step in two ways, considering not only whether its ground is true, but whether it is good also. This is characteristic of the steps of the good loves represented by sheep, goats, and kine.

The rumination of these animals represents the meditation of such affections upon truth learned, for the sake of living it. Merely to eat and swallow is to understand and receive; further rumination is from love for good life. Because the natural good will which oxen represent, may be turned either to good or to evil, Swedenborg calls them. animals of a "mediate kind," and speaks of seeing them in the World of Spirits, but not in Heaven nor in Hell.

1 A. E. 1200.