One of the functions of the Lamb of God is to transform Evil into a State,' "" that Men may be deliver'd time after time, evermore." 1 We do not know exactly by what mysterious process this change is accomplished. But it is thus that Christ has taken away the sins of the world, and for this He is to be praised rather than for His sacrifice of Himself on Calvary, which could only be a punishing of the innocent for the guilty. We see now why Jerusalem, though she had sinned, did not regard herself as soiled, but rejoiced in her forgiveness. "What is Sin but a little error and fault that is soon forgiven?" and also why Mary, when about to be repudiated by Joseph, instead of protesting her innocence, speaks of the glory that God has conferred upon her by forgiving her. To forgive "unto seventy times seven," that is to say endlessly, was Blake's command as it was Christ's, and as it was the law of that mystical realm of the Pistis Sophia described by the Gnostic Valentine in the second century, a realm where the "Supreme Mystery" pardons all offenders, if they go to Him. Sin and accusations of sin being the only cause of man's separation from his fellow-men, it follows that, in a world governed by the law of mutual forgiveness, universal love and unity will reign also. Upon this last point, Blake never tires of insisting. He preaches unceasingly the love of humanity represented by every individual man. But his love does not arise from that pity which weakens the soul and degrades its object. It is born only of brotherly affection and the spirit of self-sacrifice. It is the one religion, the great act of adoration. The Worship of God is honouring His gifts In other men; and loving the greatest men best, each according Murders the Holy One . . . He who would see the Divinity must see him in his Children, One first, in friendship and love: then a Divine Family, and in the midst This fraternity will be the great creating and binding force in the 1 Jerusalem, p. 49, 70, and p. 25, 12. 3 Jerusalem, p. 91, 7. 2 Jerusalem, p. 20, 23. We know That Man subsists by brotherhood and universal love. Man liveth not by self alone, but in his brother's face Each shall behold the Eternal Father, and love and joy abound. 1 Here we almost have a suggestion of that worship of great men which the Positivists were to evolve later on, if, indeed, one can give the name of worship to simple love, without rites or ceremonies of any kind. We are nearer still to the great maxim of Christian love: Thou shalt love thy neighbour as thyself, through love of God." But Blake went even further, and said, " because thy neighbour is God Himself." And he includes also the love of all creatures, since all are integral parts of the Eternal Man, in whose spirit the whole universe is contained. For not one sparrow can suffer, and the whole Universe not suffer also In all its Regions, and its Father and Saviour not pity and weep. 2 We have already seen several instances of the same idea in our study of his mysticism and his conception of the world. This great brotherhood of all things must express itself as it does in Christ or in Luvah, by continual acts of self-sacrifice. It is the law of Eternity that everyone must sacrifice himself for his neighbour. In this way we arrive at renunciation of self, at the destruction of personality, the annihilation of that " ego" which was the original source of all our evils. In Eternity, each individual lives and dies for others. It is this that Thel learns from the flowers and the cloud : this that Milton comes to proclaim to men. I come to Self-Annihilation. Such are the Laws of Eternity, that each shall mutually This is the only proof of love that can be given to God or man. Jesus said: Wouldest thou love one who had never died 1 Vala. Night IX, 632. 4 Jerusalem, p. 96, 23. Jerusalem, p. 25, 8. 'Milton, p. 39, 34. And the poet sums up his plan for the abolition of all laws and the reconstruction of morality in these lines. Jesus died because he strove Against the current of this Wheel: 1 its Name Is Caiaphas, the dark Preacher of Death, Of Sin, of Sorrow, and of Punishment. But Jesus is the bright Preacher of Life, And so this preacher of the Gospel of Impulse, this despiser of official truth and justice, this breaker of the Tables of the Law, concludes with this practical teaching, so childlike in its sweetness and simplicity. His doctrine is the very essence of Christianity: the doctrine of the love of all men, to which he adds, as the Indian sages did, that of self-forgetfulness and love of all nature. He who had advocated the sanctity of men's desires and the lawfulness of their complete satisfaction, ordains, by a strange contradiction, the sacrifice of those very desires, not through obedience to a tyrannical law, but solely through love and abnegation of self. In his theories as in his land of Beulah, opposing doctrines meet and are reconciled, being all equally true. And the morality expounded in his writings, like that set forth by his life, is simply the morality of all good men in all ages. In this aspect, we cannot help recognising that Blake was, despite his strong personality and his hatred of the century he lived in, the typical man of his period, that very period which he so much wished to influence and change: that he was really the companion of Rousseau and his pupils, a humanitarian philanthropist, a herald of revolutions and of popular government. Just as Rousseau cried "Follow Nature," Blake cried " Follow impulse," and did not perceive that the two doctrines are fundamentally one, which is, moreover, the only one that the destruction of all accepted laws can lead to. Blake refused, however, to believe that his impulses came to him from nature : he looked further and higher for their origin. Rousseau, too, in his own way, looked further for his conception of nature, which he understood as that of primitive man. He created this "Nature" himself, by logical reasoning, just as Blake created his Eden by sudden flashes of intuition. And, following different and widely diverging 1i.e., the Law. Jerusalem, chap. 4. Preface. 2 ways, they both arrived at the same end: the same doctrine of universal philanthropy, of liberty, fraternity, and the rights of man, and even the same broad and vague sentimentality which caused them to associate all the animal and vegetable world, and all material nature, with their own emotions and their love. Both were dreamers; one building up his visions in a logical shape with carefully reasoned mathematical precision; the other seeing them take form before his eyes, without knowing whence they came, but believing in them as firmly as the philosopher believes in his logical syllogisms. Both had the same passionate, imaginative spirit, the same feeling of dissatisfaction with the society in which they lived, the same aspirations towards an ideal unattainable except in their dreams. There is therefore nothing extraordinary in the fact that they should have arrived at the same conclusions on the subject of practical morality. But here the resemblance between them ceases. One of them revolutionised his age, altered its whole moral course, and exercised a powerful influence upon its politics. The other's life was obscure and without visible effect even upon his immediate circle, in which he might have expected to find admirers and followers. But his age failed to understand him, because he was not so much a man as a prophet, and spoke, like all prophets, in obscure parables. If he had written as a man for men, and not as a mystic for mystics, he could have stirred all his contemporaries profoundly. As it was, his words fell upon deaf ears. His mystical poetry, which should have been a whirlwind, carrying the world along with it, was only a halting strain of music; strange, complex modulations, too soon silenced, and giving a little futile pleasure to a few dreamers like himself. XIII: THE SOURCES OF HIS DOCTRINES H Ow far were Blake's doctrines his own, and how far borrowed or imitated from others? It is impossible to answer this question exactly. Some critics have held that there is no originality in Blake's theories, and that his whole system was only a medley of ideas gathered from books that he had read and conversations he had listened to. This statement is true in part, but in part only. Like all the founders of philosophical systems, he said many things that had been said before he came into the world; and most of his opinions had already found expression in the writings of other men. The only question is, what was the extent of his knowledge of, and indebtedness to, these existing systems, and in what measure was he influenced by them? Even if he added nothing to them (which is a very disputable point) he was at any rate original in his choice of materials and in his combination of isolated fragments into a new body of doctrine. Reference has already been made more than once to systems that resembled his own. We must now compare some of these systems with his, and see how far he was a plagiarist instead of being a genuine prophet. His doctrines may be summarized as comprising, in his conception of the world, the negation of the evidence of the senses and of reason; the reality of the invisible world perceived by the imagination; and the correspondence between the visible and the invisible, one being only a symbol of the other ;-in his cosmogony, the primal unity of the whole universe with God, a unity to which it will return at the end of time; the identity of God, man and nature; the process of creation by successive separations which produced individualities; and the process of regeneration by the sacrifice of these individualities and the return to the primal unity;-in psychology, the theory of "States" through which the soul passes without changing its essence; and the resulting conception of the Zoas and their struggles; -in religion, his attacks against the tyranny of the law and of Jehovah, his idea of devils as desires in revolt against this law and destined in the end to overcome it, and of Christ as the destroyer of the law, the divine humanity, the poetic imagination, and the liberator, but not the redeemer ;-finally, in morals, the lawfulness of desire, as |