Woe to you . . . hypocrites, for you make the outside of the cup and
platter clean, but the inside is full of extortion and excess. Blind
Pharisee, cleanse first the inside of the cup and platter that the
outside may also be made clean (Mt 23:25, 26).

We have shown in a number of places in the treatise _Divine Love and
Wisdom_ that reason dictates this. For what the Lord teaches He grants
man to see rationally. This a man does in two ways: in one, he sees in
himself that something is so upon hearing it; in the other, he grasps it
by reasons for it. Seeing in oneself takes place in the internal man, and
understanding through reasoning in the external man. Who does not
perceive it within himself when he hears that the internal man is to be
purified first and the external by it? But one who does not receive the
general idea of this by influx from heaven may go astray when he consults
the external of this thought; from it alone no one sees but that outward
works of charity and piety are saving apart from the internal. It is so
in other things, as that sight and hearing flow into thought, and smell
and taste into perception, that is, that the external flows into the
internal, when the contrary is true. The appearance that what is seen and
heard flows into the thought is a fallacy, for the understanding does the
seeing in the eye and the hearing in the ear, and not the other way
about. So it is in all else.

151. But something should be said here on how the internal man is
reformed and by it the external. The internal man is not reformed solely
by knowing, understanding and being wise, consequently not by thinking
only; but by willing what these teach. When a person knows, understands
and has the wisdom to see that heaven and hell exist and that all evil is
from hell and all good from heaven, and if he then does not will evil