[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 evils are not removed in the external man, lusts for them intensify; also that in the degree that evils are given free rein, the lusts increase. 113. A person does not see the lusts of his evil; he sees their enjoyments, to be sure, but still he reflects little on them, for they divert thought and drive off reflection. Unless he learned from elsewhere that they are evils he would call them goods and give them expression freely according to his thought's reasoning; doing so, he appropriates them to himself. So far as he confirms them as allowable he enlarges the court of his ruling love, which is his life's love. Lusts constitute its court, being its ministers and retinue, as it were, by which it governs the exteriors of its realm. But such as is the king, such are the ministers and retinue, and such is the kingdom. If the king is diabolic, his ministers and the retinue are insanities, and the people of his realm are falsities of every kind. The ministers (who are called wise although they are insane) cause these falsities to appear as truths by reasonings from fallacies and by fantasies and cause them to be acknowledged as truths. Can such a state in a man be changed except by the evils being removed in the external man? Then the lusts which cling to the evils are also removed. Otherwise no outlet offers for the lusts; they are shut in like a besieged city or like an indurated ulcer.