things, and to be first, and to subject others to his own will, is, in that degree, a worshiper of himself, and an idolater. And there is no doubt that much of the speculative atheism that prevails at this day is attributable to this source: for the fire of self-love in the heart, sends up a smoke into the understanding, which clouds it and shuts out the light of heaven, by which alone God can be mentally seen. Intellectual self-conceit is the destruction of many a soul, and it needs to be guarded against as a sin.
"The command, Thou shalt not make to thyself other gods, involves," says the Doctrine of the New Church, "that man should not love himself and the world above all things, for what a man loves above all things, that is his god. There are two loves altogether opposite to each other, the love of self and love to God; also the love of the world and the love of heaven. He who loves himself loves his own proprium [or selfhood], and the proprium of man is nothing but evil: hence also, he loves evil in all its complex; and he who loves evil, hates good, and thence also hates God. He who loves himself above all things, immerses his thoughts and affections in the body, and thereby in his proprium; and he who is immersed in the body and in his proprium, is in corporeal ideas, and in pleasures which are merely of the body, and hence is in thick darkness as to those things which are above. And he who is not in the light of heaven, but in thick darkness, inasmuch as he does not see anything of God, denies God, and acknowledges as God either nature, or some man, or some idol, and
