112. From this it may now be evident that for a person to be purified
from the lusts of evil, evils must by all means be removed from the
external man, for the lusts have no way out before. If no outlet exists,
they remain within and breathe out enjoyments and so incite man to
consent, thus to deed. Lusts enter the body by the external of thought;
when there is consent, therefore, in the external of thought they are
instantly in the body; the enjoyment felt is bodily. See in the treatise
_Divine Love and Wisdom_ (nn. 362-370) that the body, thus the whole man,
is what the mind is. This can be illustrated by comparisons, and by
examples.

[2] By _comparisons:_ lusts with their enjoyments can be compared to a
fire which blazes the more, the more it is nursed; the freer its way the
more widely it spreads until in a city it consumes houses and in a woods
the trees. In the Word, moreover, lusts are compared to fire, and the
evils from them to a conflagration. The lusts of evil with their
enjoyments also appear as fires in the spiritual world; hellfire is
nothing else. Lusts may also be compared to floods and inundations as
dikes or dams give way. They may also be likened to gangrene and
abscesses which bring death to the body as they run their course or are
not healed.

[3] By _examples:_ it is obvious that when evils are not removed in the
external man, the lusts with their enjoyments grow and flourish. The more
he steals the more a thief lusts to steal until he cannot stop; so with a
defrauder, the more he defrauds; it is the same with hatred and
vengeance, luxury and intemperance, whoredom and blasphemy. It is
notorious that the love of ruling from the love of self increases when
left unbridled; so also the love of possessing things from love of the
world; they seem to have no limit or end. Plain it is then that so far as