Usefulness of the passions.

1. The angels continue: "Thus you will be aware of people being driven by diverse passions. One feels the need to possess everything that is of value; this obviously is avarice, which is a vice. And behold, you have this passion to thank for sea faring, because only exceedingly greedy and acquisitive people would be moved by the life threatening desire to find the means to swim across the exceedingly wide sea to discover whether perhaps there are lands beyond the sea, bristling with unheard-of treasures. After much toilsomeness and threat to life they come upon a land beyond the sea that is still completely uninhabited. The great dangers they lived through have cooled down their vice of acquisitiveness, robbing them of courage for return journey. They settled down wherever the wind took them, building huts and dwellings and in this way populated a still unpeopled land. – Now judge for yourself whether people without the vices of avarice and profit would have discovered a foreign land?

2. Let us take the vice of the lust of the flesh. Overlook this vice, and imagine mankind as celestially chaste as possible, and you shall be well pleased with the purest maiden and most abstinent bachelor into their greying days. But think of all mankind as being of such chastity and ask yourself: what are the propagation prospects of such a generation, as laid out in the divine order? From this you can see that this vice also has to be inherent to man, or the earth would be devoid of man! It is certainly true that, as experience shows, one man or another loses control over this passion, and that such loss of control is always against God's order and therefore sin. Yet repeated offence against this divine order is still preferable at all times to complete extirpation of same.

3. All powers given to man and initially manifests hard to constrain vices must nevertheless be capable of full positive or negative development, or man would stay like lukewarm water and sink into reeking indigence.

4. We tell you: Nothing else can testify more completely and truly to the divine destiny of man than men's lowest depravity opposite their greatest virtue, for only therefrom it becomes evident with what unlimited abilities men of this earth have been endowed. Man's path reaches from God's highest heaven, which is inaccessible even to us angels, to the lowest hell. If that were not the case, how could he attain to the sonship of God?

5. We have to deal with men on countless other worlds, but what a difference between here and there. There men have been set boundaries, spiritually as well as naturally, which they can overcome only with great difficulty. But you men of this earth are as unlimited in spirit as the Lord Himself and can do whatever you want. You can raise yourselves right to the centre of God's dwelling, but because of that you can also fall as deep as Satan himself who was once the very freest spirit out of God. And when he did fall, he had of necessity to fall into the most profound depth of all depravity from which the will hardly ever find a way back because God had given to vice the same endless ability to perfection as to virtue.