From the Posthumous Theological Works of Emanuel Swedenborg
Canons of the New Church
1. Love is spiritual conjunction.2. True love cannot be quiescent in itself, and be restrained within its own limits, but it wills to go forth and embrace others with love.
3. True love wills to be conjoined to others, and to communicate with them, and to give of its own.
4. True love wills to dwell in others, and in itself from others.
5. The Divine Love, which is Love itself, and God Himself, wills that it may be in a subject which is His image and likeness; consequently He wills to be in man, and man to be in Him.
6. In order that this may be effected, it follows from the very essence of Love, which is in God, and hence from an urgent cause, that the universe must needs be created by God, in which are earths, and upon them men, and in the men minds and souls, with which the Divine Love can be conjoined.
7. Therefore all things which are created regard man as the end.
8. Since the angelic heaven is formed from men, from their spirits and souls, all things which are created regard the angelic heaven as the end.
9. The angelic heaven is the habitation itself of God with men, and of men with God.
10. Eternal beatitudes, felicities, and delights together, are the ends of creation, because they are of love.
11. This end is the inmost; thus as it were, the life and soul, and as force and endeavor in each and all created things.
12. That end is God in them.
13. This end implanted in created things, in general and in particular, causes the universe to be preserved in the created state, in so far as the ends of an opposite love do not obstruct and destroy.
14. God from His Divine Omnipotence, Omnipresence, and Omniscience, continually provides lest opposite ends from opposite loves should prevail, and the work of creation be ruined even to destruction.
15. Preservation is perpetual creation, as subsistence is perpetual existence.
(Canons Chp 7:11)