[7] Without those two faculties man would not have immortality or eternal life. This follows from what has been said: that by the two faculties there is conjunction with the Lord and also reformation and regeneration. By conjunction man has immortality, and through reformation and regeneration he has eternal life. As every man, evil as well as good, is conjoined to the Lord by the two faculties every man has immortality. Eternal life, or the life of heaven, however, only that man has with whom there is reciprocal conjunction from inmosts to outmosts.

The reasons may now be clear why the Lord, in all the procedure of His divine providence, safeguards the two faculties in man unimpaired and as sacred.

97. ( viii) It is therefore To act in freedom according to reason, to act from liberty and rationality, and to act from will and understanding, are the same. But it is one thing to act in freedom according to reason, or from liberty and rationality, and another thing to act from freedom itself according to reason itself or from liberty and rationality themselves. The man who does evil from love of evil and confirms it in himself acts indeed from freedom according to reason, but his freedom is not in itself freedom or very freedom, but an infernal freedom which in itself is bondage, and his reason is not in itself reason, but is either spurious or false or plausible through confirmations. Still, either is of divine providence. For if freedom to will evil and do it as of the reason through confirmation of it were taken from the natural man, liberty and rationality and at the same time will and understanding would perish, and he could not be withdrawn any longer from evils, be reformed or united with the Lord, and live to eternity. The Lord therefore guards man's freedom as a man does the apple of his eye. Through that freedom the Lord steadily withdraws man from evils and so far as He can do this implants goods, thus gradually putting heavenly freedom in place of infernal freedom.

98. We said above that every man has the faculty of volition called liberty and the faculty of understanding called rationality. Those faculties, moreover, it should be known, are as it were inherent in man, for humanness itself is in them. But as was just said, it is one thing to act from freedom in accord with reason, and another thing to act from freedom itself and according to reason itself. Only those do the latter who have suffered themselves to be regenerated by the Lord; others act in freedom according to thought which they make seem like reason. Unless he was born foolish or supremely stupid, every person can attain to reason itself and by it to liberty itself. Many reasons why all do not do so will be disclosed in what follows. Here we shall only tell to whom freedom itself or liberty itself, and at the same time reason itself or rationality itself cannot be given and to whom they can hardly be given.

[2] True liberty and rationality cannot be given to those foolish from birth or to those who become foolish later, while they remain so. Nor can they be given to those born stupid and dull or to any made so by the torpor of idleness, or by a disease which perverts or entirely closes the interiors of the mind, or by love of a bestial life.

[3] Genuine liberty and rationality cannot be given to those in Christendom who utterly deny the Divine of the Lord and the holiness of the Word, and have kept that denial confirmed to life's close. For this is meant by the sin against the Holy Spirit which is not forgiven in this world or in the world to come (Mt 12:31, 32).

[4] Liberty itself and rationality itself cannot be given to those who ascribe all things to nature and nothing to the Divine, and have made this a conviction by reasonings from visible things; for these are atheists.

[5] True liberty and rationality can hardly be given to those who have confirmed themselves much in falsities of religion; for a confirmer of falsity is a denier of truth. But they can be given to those, in whatever religion, who have not so confirmed themselves. On this see what is adduced in Doctrine for the New Jerusalem about Sacred Scripture, nn. 91-97.

[6] Infants and children cannot attain to essential liberty and rationality before they grow up. For the interiors of the mind of man are opened gradually, and meanwhile are like seeds in unripe fruit, without ground in which to sprout.

99. We have said that true liberty and rationality cannot be given to those who have denied the Divine of the Lord and the holiness of the Word; to those who have confirmed themselves in favor of nature and against the Divine; and hardly to those who have strongly confirmed themselves in falsities of religion; still none of these have destroyed the faculties themselves. I have heard atheists, who had become devils and satans, understand arcana of wisdom quite as well as angels, but only while they heard them from others; on returning into their own thought, they did not understand them, for the reason that they did not will to do so. They were shown that they could also will this, did not the love and enjoyment of evil turn them away. This they understood, too, when they heard it. Indeed they asserted that they could but did not will to be able to do so, for then they could not will what they did will, namely, evil from enjoyment in the lust of it. I have often heard such astonishing things in the spiritual world. I am fully persuaded therefore that every man has liberty and rationality, and that every man can attain true liberty and rationality if he shuns evils as sins. But the adult who has not come into true liberty and rationality in the world can never do so after death, for the state of his life remains to eternity what it was in the world.