these fail in the church, there is sadness and desolation!—"Be ye ashamed, O ye husbandmen; howl, O ye vine dressers, for the wheat and for the barley; because the harvest of the field is perished." (Joel i. 11.) The harvest of the church, the spiritual field, is perished, when love to God and man is supplanted by the love of self and the world.
Man, at creation, receives from the Lord two faculties, will and understanding; the one is the power to love God and all that is good; the other, to love man and all that is true. These are his own, and not another's, and he is faithfully to use them for his own eternal good, by exercising them in producing his spiritual sustenance—the celestial love of God, and the charity to man—which together form the kingdom of heaven in his own soul. The will, being the supreme faculty, in which his life's love dwells, with all affection and desire, is the upper power; and the understanding, where affection terminates in thought, and goodness in truth, is the nether; and inasmuch as by the exercise of these, love is increased in him and truth multiplied, therefore these are, in the Divine Law, signified by the upper and nether millstone, which were not to be pledged to, or bound by others, because it would be the binding or pledging of the very life. From the exercise of celestial love, corresponding truths in the mind are multiplied a thousand fold, just as the one grain of wheat, in passing between the millstones is immensely multiplied in the particles of flour. The same is the case with spiritual love, or the barley; for who can number the truths and benefits arising from charity and love to man! These two, the nether and upper millstone, are sacred de-
