world so intersected being known by the name of Religion, while the greater portion of the world remains outside Religion, and therefore, by hypothesis, outside the compass and operation of God, being full of profanities and heresies which religion repudiates. On the right side, which is the poet's view of Religion, we see Religion included in the world, as part of its phenomena, and both of them surrounded and permeated by God.

In a word, the tendency of all Religion is self-worship. Forgetting that God made the world, and remembering, as it fancies, that he made Religion, it bows down to the idol of itself, and on its own altar immolates its own divine faculty of reason.

CHAPTER III

THE CONSECRATION OF POETRY

NOT only does Heresy receive consecration by the mouth of Job, but Poetry, the greatest and most difficult of all the Arts, speaks through his lips, as the servant of God, holding the divine commission to enlarge and reform Religion by pointing out new methods in the search for God and the study of his ways.

"The Religions of all Nations are derived from each nation's different reception of the Poetic Genius which is everywhere called the spirit of prophecy." So cries our English prophet-poet, heading his utterances with the words: "The Voice of one crying in the Wilderness," as well he may; for profoundly true as the assertion is, it is not at

1

1 There is no Natural Religion, Works of William Blake, vol. 1, p. 101.

all likely to be received with gratitude by doctrinal Religion; since it obviously carries with it the farther truth, that poets possess the right, and are possessed by the inherent impulse to correct, amplify, and supplement Religion, eternally preventing it from becoming a Select Seminary for Saved Souls.

Objection may possibly be taken that there are such things as sacred Poetry and sacred Art, and that the Church of the Middle Ages was the guardian and preserver of them. the only really Church of Art.

But poetry is universal; Catholic Church is the There is nothing the poet must not know; no country that is not his province. The famous saying of Marcus Aurelius is not only applicable to him, but if there be any knowledge that is not human he must know that also. To do one thing supremely well, the poet must know everything. Religion, as it has hitherto existed on earth, is only one branch of knowledge. The universal knowledge arrogated by its votaries is contradicted even by themselves; for what have they to say when confronted

by Job and his miseries? But by virtue of its universality, Poetry recognises that "he who is out of the Church and opposes it is no less an agent of religion than he who is in it; to be an error and to be cast out is part of God's design."1

The words would cover, of course, the case of the sceptic, but perhaps Blake was of opinion that sceptics deceive themselves; that they, too, would be among the seekers after God were it not that, right in their path, they encounter the grotesque caricature of him designed by theology, and tilt against this windmill, fancying it is the real giant.

Nor am I unmindful that there is a great deal of inferior and spurious Poetry. So there is of Religion, for that matter; but I repeat and reaffirm that one of the highest functions of the poet is to reform theology by enlarging the idea of God and making it more proportionate to the marvels and mysteries of the world in which we live, and most of all to the human spirit itself. The 1 Selections from Blake, p. 251.

five measures of meal of Religion have never contained the leaven of Science; the so-called attacks of Science have always come from without; nor was the late Professor Drummond's attempt to change this order, by introducing Natural Law into the Spiritual World, successful. Wherever there is a relation between two things it is always easy to represent it topsy-turvy; and it is evident that a material interpretation of spirit is nothing more than a spiritual interpretation of matter, upside down. The leaven contained in Religion is that of Poetry, which is destined ever and anon to permeate it, till the whole is leavened.

The speaker of the very words I have paraphrased was himself a poet. What beauty of philosophy was in his utterances! What an exquisite discourse is the Sermon on the Mount! What unsurpassed pathos and beauty are there in the lament over Jerusalem! Suppose his teaching had been given to the world in a form like that of the Thirty-nine Articles-even if he had laid down his life for the sake of