clarke, j.h.-william blake on the lords prayer 1927

7/29/2019 CLARKE, J.H.-William Blake on the Lords Prayer 1927

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WILLIAM BLAKEON

THE LORD'S PRAYER


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WILLIAM BLAKE(1757-1827 ,

ON

THE LORD'S PRAYER

BYJOHN HENRY CLARKE. M.D.

THE HERMES PRESS.

MCMXXVII.


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"To open the Eternal Worlds, to open the Immortal"Eyes of Man inwards into the Worlds of Thought;"into Eternity; Ever expanding into the Bosom of"God, the Human Imagination."


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TO

"THE YOUNG MEN OF THE NEW AGE"

- OUR OWN

WHOM BLAKE ADDRESSED

IN

DESPAIR

OF FINDING VISION AND UNDERSTANDING

IN HIS OWN TIME

THIS FRAGMENT

IS

DEDICATED

IN

HOPE.


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Copyright InGre..t Brlt&in.


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PREFACE.Some thirty odd years ago, having a long journey

into the country bejore me, I put into m y travelling-bag the Aldine edition of Blane's poems. u p to thenI had been familiar with the "Songs 01 Innocenceand of Experience." I had now the isolation fromexternal affairs and the solitude sometimes to be foundin a long train-journey, and I embarked upon thatamazing document, " The Everlasting Gospel." Fromthat moment Blase gripped me with a hold which timehas only strengthened.

Blake says his conception of the most sublime poetryis an allegory addressed to the intellectual powers andentirely hidden from the corporeal understanding.M y "corporeal u nd er st an di ng " d id not attempt thetask of comprehending, but m y inner understandingknew it jar divine truth.

Since that day I have seized every opportunity whichhas come in m y way of acquiring such aids as havepresented themselves of educating m y corporeal understanding up to such a point that I could shape formyself, and possibly for others, the essence of theMessage which Blake completed on his death-bed just


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one hundred years ago. A nd there has been no lackof such aids. They have been gathering in numbersand power for the last half-century and scarcely a daynow passes in which some addition to them of momentis not announced.One of Blake's designs depicts Nebuchadnezzar

in his madness. We live, as Blake lived, in aNebuchadnezzar age. We are madly clinging withhands and feet to the materiality oj earth when weshould be standing erect upon it or moving over itssurface ruling empires of the mind. Blake has revealedto us, as no one else ever did before,what those empiresare, and what are the powers in man of recognisingthem and oj exercising his rule.

The point oj advantage in our age over that inwhich Blake lived and wrote is this, that now thereis a wide-spread recognition oj the fact that thematerial diet on which our minds are banquettingcan never satisjy the soul of man. Thus it iscoming about that the more like Nebuchadnezearman becomes in mentality the keener is the revoltagainst the madness. That the revolt is taking manyforms, some of them only a little less insane thanthat against which it is protesting, need not bedenied;but the revolt itself is an advance.

The essence of the Revolt means this, that althoughwe are all more or less wedded to our own conceptions


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of eternal truth and mistake our conceptions for truthitself, yet the discovery of our error is awakening ourminds to rebel against the obsession. Our conceptionsof truths are much dearer to our temporal egos thanare the truths themselves, and anything whichmilitates, or appears to militate, against our finiteconceptions we resent as personal injuries. And theRevolt against this cardinal error is the one thingwhich Blake is arousing in every line he writes andevery stroke of his pencil and graver and brush. Hisinspiration will not allow him to "cease from mentalfight" against this Satan-Man's self-hood ortemporal ego-until the temporal personality of M anhas subjected itself and all it loves and desires to thedeity whose throne every man is.

One aspect of this mental figh t, which Bloke isurging with ever-increasing ardour, is to be found inhis pencilled comments on a certain academic versionof the Lord's Prayer, and it has seemed to me thataround this as a text may be drawn a picture of theSpiritual Form of Bloke in his contest with "TheAccuser of Sins," the God of This World.

J. H. C.

Pett Level,Good Friday, 1926.


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BIBLIOGRAPHY."The Life of William BIake." By Alexander Gilchrist.

First published 1863.The first book to make known to the world the Man andhis Works in a comprehensive volume. A new editionedited by W. Grah..m Robertson was published by John] .ane in 1906."Williarn Blake." A Critical Essay. By AlgernonCharles Swinburne. First written 1866.The first appreciation of Blnke by 1\ brother poet of thehighest rank ... The Poetical Works of William Blake," edited with

a prefatory memoir by W. M. Rosetti, 1874. (" TheAldine Poets." George Bell & Sons.)" The Works of William Blake, Poetic, Symbolic andCritical," By Edward John Ellis and William ButlerYeats. (Ql1aritch, 1893.)This was the first work which made it possible to readBlake'g Poems ao; 1\ whole.

"The Poetical Works of William Blake," edited witha Bibliographical Introduction and Textual Notes byJohn Sampson. ( Oxford University Press, 1913. )This is the most complete small edition of Blake's poemsand the most carefudy and satisfactorily edited upto its dnte,


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11 The Paintings of William Blake," by Darrell Figgis,with 100 Plates, 16 in colour and 84 in colloty pe.(Ernest Berm, 1925.)

11 The Writings of William Blake," edited in threeVolumes by Geoffrey Keynes. (The Nonesuch Press,16, Great James Street, London, 1925.)The final textual authori ty on all the writings of Blakeboth poetical and prose. Keynes has made it possible,for the first time to read all Blake's writings, in theirproper setting in a single work."Williarn Blake, his Philosophy and Symbols." by

S. Foster Damon. (Constable, 1924.)This is by far the most luminous and profound as well 8S

the most complete of the interpretat ions of Blake'swritings known to me.11 Blake's Vision of the Book of Job," with repro

ductions of the illustrations. A study by Joseph Wicksteed. 2nd Edition. (London, Dent. New York,Dutton, 1924.)

11 William Blake," by G. K. Chesterton. ( D u c k ~worth & Co.)"Life of Paracelsus (1493-1541) and the Substance

of his Teachings," by Franz Hartrnann, M.D. (KeganPaul.)

"The Life and Doctrines of Jacob Boehme (15751624), the God-taught Philosopher," with an Introduction and Notes by Franz Hartmann, M.D. (MacoyPublishing Co., New York, 1919.)


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" Clothed with the Sun." Being the book of I1Iumi-nations of Anna (Bonus) Kingsford, M.D. (Watkins,1912.)

"The Life of Jehoshua, the Prophet of Nazareth," byFranz Hartmann, M.D. ( Kegan Paul, 1909.)

"Bhagavad Gita" (The Songs of the Master.)Translated with an Introduction and Commentary byCharles Johnston, (Quarterly Book Department. NewYork, 1908.)

Logia Iesu, New sayings of Jesus and A Fragmentof a Lost Gospel from Oxyrhynchus. Edited withTranslation and Commentary by Bernard F. GrenfeIland Arthur S. Hunt. (Henry Frowde, 1904.)


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CONTENTS .

Chapter. Page.I. SELF-KNOWLEDGE 1II. THE Tw o VISIONS 17Ill. THE GOD OF THE JEWS 29VI. THE CODE OF THE JEWS 44V. GOOD AND EVIL 54VI. BLAKE'S GOD ... 65VII . IDOL WORSHIP . . . 76VIII . CREEDS . . . S3XI. DR. THORNTON ON THE

LORD'S PRAYER 99X. THE PRAYER ITSELF IN

SEVERAL TONGUES 118XI. A PARAPHRASE OF THE PRAYER 126XII . THE HISTORICITY OF THE

BIBLE 131XII I . UNBERUFEN 146XIV . WISDOM AND VISION 154


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The quotations from Blake's writings, except such asare embodied in the text, will be found printed inspecial type. No inverted commas will beneeded there-fore to distinguish them, and such as do appear will

be Blake's own. The Capitals are also his.


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CHAPTER 1.SELF - KNOWLEDGE

IT is told of a certain university tutor,not unversed in the works of Plato, that

he had an original question to put to everypupil whom he received. The question was.something like this: " Well, Mr. Studiosus,is your ignorance simple or compound?""I am afraid, Sir," was the usual rejoinder,"I fail to understand the distinction."HSimple ignorance" he would explain, Hiswhen you don't know, and you know youdon't know. Compound ignorance is whenyou don't know, and you don't know youdon't know." Conversely, there is simpleand compound knowledge-a knowledgewhich knows that it knows, and aknowledge which knows and is quite

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BLAKE ON THE LORD'S PRAYERunconscious of its knowing. This .latterkind of knowledge is called instinct in theanimal world. It is the knowledge of thespider which enables her to weave her webon strict mathematical principles; theknowledge of the bee which impels her tobuild her cells on the most economicallines, the knowledge of the swallow whichteaches her to find her way back from thesouth to her northern nesting place ofyester year.In the human economy there is aninfinite variety of the same kind of unconscious, and semi-conscious knowledge."Intuition" is the name by which some partof it is known, and this means "inwardvision." It implies the possession of afaculty of seeing things which are hiddenfrom the external senses, a faculty whichpre-supposes the existence of an invisibleorganism with invisible organs within thevisible body. Again, every human beingpossesses a knowledge of the profoundestalchemy by means of which he is able, for

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SELF - KNOWLEDGEexample, to transmute bread into blood.The ordinary man does not know that hehas this knowledge, and yet he exercisesit, and that without the help of any otherperson. I t is only when the occultmachinery by which he works the miracleis out of harmony that he becomes conscious of its presence through the languageof pain.

This is only one among numberlessinstances of knowledge in man whichman's simple knowledge does not know.I t is compound knowledge-the knowledgewhich knows it knows-which man mustnow acquire, and with this his wholeexistence as part of nature is in processof endowing him. Experience, indeed, isthe Daily Bread which is being alchemisedby him into soul self-knowledge. Toattain this end the bread of one life-time isby no means sufficient. How many it mayrequire depends upon the aptness of eachindividual pupil in his successive schoolsof life.

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BLAKE ON THE LORD'S PRAYERThis much every man does know-that

he has a Will to create ideas, and a Mind toexecute his designs; that he has affectionsand emotions-all this he knows, and healso knows that will, desire, mind, affections, emotions, are all intangible, invisibleand imperceptible to his external senses.

It is not a great step from this point to theconsciousness that he is himself in possessionof a dual nature and is leading a double existence, one material and sensual and oneimmaterial. For the moment, the former,the sensual world, seems to claim all hisallegiance, for he is apt to designate it as his" real" world, as distinguished from theworld which he knows to exist, but which isbeyond thecornpass ofhis fi.vesenses to define.

This is the natural result of the presenttopsey-turveydom in the world's affairs.The spirit of man is submerged-headdownwards-in the material. The kingdom of the world is the Kingdom of theMaterial, and the god of this World is thedivinity of its worship.

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SELF - KNOWLEDGEBut although submerged the spirit of

Man has never been and never can beextinguished. From the remotest timesthere have been those whose vision wasunconfined by material organs, who wereable tc read the language which is in-dependent of human speech, and which isfound expressed in countless signs andsymbols. Symbols may be and often havebeen turned to base uses, but for those whocan read them they tell their true story.The human body is itself a symbol.

There is a symbol of great antiquity,representing two equilateral triangles, onewi th its base parallel with earth and itsapex pointing upward, the other with thesame-base line and its apex pointingdownward. The latter triangle is theshadow of the former and represents thetemporal and mortal part of man as theother triangle represents his spirit and soul.

Now the shadow triangle has risen untilit has almost obscured the first and hasbrought the centres of the two to coincide,

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BLAKE ON THE LORD'S PRAYER

THE PERMANENT EGO AND ITSSHADOW.

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SELF - KNOWLEDGE

THE SEAL OF SOLOMON.7


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BLAKE ON THE LORD'S PRAYERand when the centres coincide we havethe "Seal of Solomon"-dremon est Deustnoersus.This is the great Event which has hap

pened in the Universe of Man. The Mindof Man is this central point-with .itsdouble aspect and double polarity, and theconflict, or controversy, between these twopolarities is the origin of the" Fall of Man,"of Creation, of Nature herself, and constitutes the Celestial Bread of Man's experienceout of which his Self-Knowledge grows.The shadow triangle represents the

material part of the bodily organisationwith its apex polarised downwards or outwards, towards the material. The real andpermanent triangle represents the invisible,indestructible organism in man, polarisedupward or inward, away from all that ismaterial, finite and temporal. The mentalorganism of man is the arena in which thetwo centres-the infinite and the finite-arefused, and the self-consciousness of the oneis being constantly lost within that of the

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SELF - KNOWLEDGEother ego. The whole of life, of history, ofpolitics, of creation may be found in thisone point.

There is in life nothing real which hasnot i"LS shadow and nothing true whichhas not its counterfeit. All the development of every individual consists in hismaking continual choice between thesetwo. There is a real ego in every manand there is also a shadow ego as there isin every animal. The shadow ego knowsitself as-that is to say, believes itself tobe-a separate, self-existent entity; whichit is not. There is nothing separate in theuniverse. Everything is related to everyother thing and connected with every otherthing. But that is not the worst of thetrouble. This illusory, temporal, shadow,counterfeit ego, with its downward andoutward polarisation, claims dominion overthe real, invisible infinite ego which is,as it were, married to-it. The end of everylife is for every infini te ego to recover its

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BLAKE ON THE LORD'S PRAYERown self-consciousness -se l f-knowledgeand to claim the kingdom of the Man forits own. Then will there be but onetriangle-the shadow will be digested andtransmuted into essential substance andwill vanish. The umbilical cord whichfetters man to the material and sensualattractions of mother Nature will besevered, there will be one polarisationonly-to the truecentre ; Manwill be reborn.

It must not be supposed that the realego is either unconscious or inactive all thetime that he is under the dominion ofhis shadow. There is no act of kindness,of self-denial, which he does not prompt.There is no right choice made betweentruth and error which he does not inspire.And whenever the shadow will is allowedto conquer in a fight the pangs of conscience in the shadow are the witness ofthe true ego's protest.The conquest of the real over the shadowself may take an age or it may take

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SELF - KNO\VLEDGEMany years ago I remember reading of

an instance of the latter kind. A quarryman was engaged. in supervising thehaulage of stones up a very deep shaft.I t was his duty to receive each load atthe top, and if any fragments fell to givewarning to those below with the cry "Wareout." This enabled those below to standclear before the stones reached the bottom.One day his own foot slipped and hehimself fell down the shaft. But as he fellthe cry "Ware out" rang clear down theshaft-and his own body after it. In thatsupreme moment of self-forgetfulness of theouter ego, the inner ego found its ownself-knowledge. In mystic parlance, thequarryman had "squared the circle" andhad "found the philosopher's stone."

It is possible to obtain a conceptionof individual man's place in the greatuniverse by a consideration of his ownblood-stream. To ordinary sight bloodlooks like an uniform red paint, but the

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BLAKE ON THE LORD'S PRAYERmicroscope reveals that it is composedof an infinite number of separate livingbodies floating in a fluid medium. Everyone of these bodies has its own life, itsown function, and some of them behaveas if they had independent wills and movements of their own. And to a certainextent they have. And yet their life isnot separate from the life of the bloodstream, and the life of the blood-stream isnot separate from the life of the organsand tissues which it feeds and from whichit originates. And the life of the bloodand of the organs and tissues is notseparate from the life, the mind, the soul,the spirit, the will and the understandingof the man of whose organism it formspart. In actual fact the life of the ope isthe life of the other.So is it with each individual man and

woman in the great universe. They arein no wise separate from or independentof the life, mind, heart and soul of theplanet, of the solar system and the entire

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SELF - KNO\VLEDGEgreat universe. If we picture to ourselvesevery one of our own blood corpuscles asbeing under the illusion that it is somethingcomplete in itself with separate aims andseparate interests we can understand alittle of the illusion under which we areall enslaved until our own inner sensesawake and we learn to know ourselvesas we actually are.

" Polarisation" is a word which containsa key to unlock many secrets. The entirevisible animal organism like the blooditself, is made up of countless myriads ofliving organisms all within the microcosmof the individual, and all with individualwills, so to speak, of their own. Everyorgan, every tissue, every organic fluid ismade up of living cells and their products,Every cell has its own body, soul andspirit-membrane, nucleus and nucleolusor innermost centre; its own life-historyand destiny. And every cell has its ownpolarity. The cell elements are all

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BLAKE ON THE LORD'S PRAYERpolarised- have their powers focussedtowards and in their own nucleolus orcentre. But the centres have also theirown polarity; all the centres of everyorgan are polarised to that organ's vitalcentre. The organs themselves, again, haveeach its own polarity, and all are polarisedto the particular centre immediately above,be it flesh, blood, gland, nerve, solar plexus,spinal cord, brain, up to the invisiblemind and emotional centre of the man.When there is no assertion of independentindividual will on the part of any cell orany organ then is the organism in a stateof health. When any of this proletariatasserts a will and rule of its own, independent of the innermost centre, thereis disorder, disease, ruin, corruption, andif vital connections are cut, revolution anddeath of the microcosmos-separation ofthe life from the form.

Let it not be supposed for a momentthat the shadow-self has not its profoundlyimportant uses and purposes in the organ-

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SELF - KNOWLEDGEism, one of which is to provide anexercise-ground for practising the facultyof choice. The light of the moon, whichis a reflexion of the light of the sun hasits uses. But if we mistake the originof the moon's light, and attribute it tothe moon itself we are in error. Theevents of outer existence appear to ourouter ego real and solid and permanent.Our inner ego knows them to be temporaland derived. Nevertheless we are obligedto accept the convention that they are real,and to act as if they were. Just in thesame way we do not refuse to accept thelight of the moon although we know itdoes not originate with her. Thus theevents of outer life provide us with discipline and judgment by accepting them attheir face value. But, all the same, wemust know that they are passing andillusory.Nevertheless they are real illusions, andif the inner ego recognises them as such,

then all will be well. It is the error15


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BLAKE ON THE LORD'S PRAYERof mistaking them for eternal realitieswhich brings all the trouble. This isinsanity. But if we were to act as if theywere illusions, that also would be insanity.We are existing in a world of conventions,and nothing is to be gained by pretendingthat we are not. The two planes-theinner and the outer-the ruler and theruled-though uni ted, are discrete andshould be kept each in its own place.

When this knowledge is attained-whenMan can envisage Life from the standpointof his Eternal ego-Man can be said toknow himself with a compound know-ledge-with a knowledge that knows thatit knows.

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CHAPTER H.THE TWO VISIONS

THE foregoing chapter may seem a some-what long preamble on the way to

Blake, but there is still some distance totravel before we can appreciate the passionwhich consumed him when confronted witha materialised interpretation of one of themost spiritual documents in the world'streasury. And as that is the version whichnearly all the world of Christianity acceptsat the present day, it becomes necessarythat we should be able to find our wayout of the shadow-consciousness-the fivesensual world-into Blake's world of Lightand Vision. For it was in this world, theworld of intuition, that Blake lived andsaw and thought and designed and wrote.The five senses were to him so many

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BLAKE ON THE LORD'S PRAYER11 windows" of the soulligh ting man in his11 caverned" state (the mortal body), butby no means limiting his possibilities ofVISIOn. To accept the evidences of thesenses, as if they told all the truth, was toBlake supreme folly. To look throughthem, as through a window, was wisdom;to see with them, as if they were the facultyof vision and not its instrument, led onlyto error. Thus it becomes necessary to riseabove the 11 Five windows of the Soul,"which "distorts the heavens"-the "heavens"be it noted-"from pole to pole," and todevelop the inward vision-intuition-if weare not to be perpetual slaves of illusion.For this internal vision is just as much anintegral part of man as are his flesh andbones. This inward vision is in continualoperation, but in ordinary mortals this ispart of the unconscious knowledge whichdoes not know that it knows. The con-sciousness of that part of man, which isrightly described as animal intellect hasnot yet made contact with it.

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TH E T\VO VISIONSI t may be fairly said that the sense o f

sight is the premier sense of the five. Sightis the mystical sense. In the sensual worldall things are divided by this sense intotwo sections-the Visible and the In-visible. This is not so to the same extentwith the other senses. But it is necessaryto remember that this is not the samedivision as between the material and theimmaterial. For there are infinitely morethings in the universe which are materialand yet invisible than there are which arediscernable by the mortal sense of sight.The air we breathe is invisible, but yetit is matter. Oxygen, hydrogen, nitrogen,are equally invisible and yet they arematter. Oxygen and hydrogen unitedbecome visible as water, and water becomesinvisible as steam. So that the test ofsight is not the test of matter.Take, for another example, an egg. We

see the shell of an egg and say we haveseen an egg, but we do not see the yolk,the white, the germ, the lining membrane,

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BLAKE ON THE LORD'S PRAYERuntil we break the shell. And when wehave broken the shell and have seen allthese, we have not really seen the egg, forthe egg is much more than them all. Theegg is a living organism, comprisingpowers and principles invisible which arecapable of developing from the egg anactive, mobile, sensitive, conscious entity.And we have not even seen the shell of

the egg, though we think we have. Wehave seen its colour and shape, but wehave not seen the innumerable poresthrough which the coming chick will drawits breath, and from which, if the shell isvarnished, Of covered with flour, no chickwill ever come. The life of the shell noman has ever seen, and yet it is there readyto transfer its lime into the blood andbones of the bird, and leave the shell sothin that when incubation is complete thebird can easily break it and escape.We have not seen-no mortal eye hasever seen-the Life-principle of the egg.

It is there all the same, ready to vitalise20


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THE TWO VISIONSthe embryo which contains, in epitome,every organ, every cell, every feather of theegg's two parents, to be revealed to sightlater on, if it finds the proper conditions.Life is invisible, indestructible, infinite.Life may be driven from a form but itcannot be destroyed. I t can be drivenfrom an egg by excess of heat as in cooking,or by putrefaction, but the Life is notdestroyed. And when the egg becomes abird of the air, there is revealed to thePoet's vision, something vastly greaterthan the form which our senses perceive:

How do you know but every bird that wingsthe aery way

Is an infinite world of delight shut in byyour senses five?

How much invisible intelligence can bepacked into the compass of a tiny egg-shellmay be gathered from an incident whichhappened to a medical friend of mine. Inthe course of a country ramble he cameupon a water-hen's nest on the margin ofa lake. Alarmed by his approach the

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BLAKE ON THE LORD'S PRAYERmother bird took to the water and swamaway, followed by her brood, leaving whatappeared to be one egg behind in the nest.Thinking that this was a spoiled egg, myfriend picked it up, when, to his amaze-ment, out dropped a bit of animated fluffinto the water and swam away after itsmother like the rest, leaving an emptyshell in his hand.

Recurring to the physiological fact ofthe relationship of the cells of the humanblood to the being of man, let us imagineone of these elements becoming consciousof its relationship to the universe of theman who has created i t -how it is part ofthe man's body, mind, soul, spirit, havinga body, soul, spirit, life of its own, and yetnot its own personal, separate possession- then we can gather some idea of theindividual man's place in the infiniteuniverse, the macrocosm. Man's five sensesseparate man into divisions and compart-ments, and so long as we understand thatthis separation, division, is a convention

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THE T\VO VISIONSfor the use of man's corporeal understand-ing, and not a spiritual fact no harm isdone. It is a convention which is necessaryfor man's temporal, corporeal mind on itsway to spiritual evolution.As no man can truly say that he has

ever seen an egg, so, in like manner, itmay be said that no mortal eye has everseen any human being. All that the eye hasseen of man is his shell or outer garment,whilst the real Man who has made his ownvisible part just as surely as the snail hascreated its own shell, is invisible and intangible to the outer senses.But to the Seer the organism which

weaves the visible "garment" of Man isnot invisible. "The Soul is form and doththe body make" wrote Spenser, and thePoet sees the soul and the soul-world evenmore clearly than he sees the world ofmatter."I assert for myself," wrote Blake, "thatI do not behold the outward creation, and

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BLAKE ON THE LOH.D'S PRAYER'What! ' it will be questioned, 'when thesun rises, do you not see a disc of fire,somewhat like a guinea?' Oh! no, no!I see an innumerable company of theheavenly host, crying, 'Holy, holy, holy, isthe Lord God Almighty! ' I question notmy corporeal eye, any more than I wouldquestion a window, concerning a sight. Ilook through it, and not with it."The two poems from letters to Mr. Butts

are vivid examples of the nature of thevision which was habitual to Blake. Atone time it was two-fold-he sees thesymbol and its meaning. Again it ISthree-fold and yet again it is four-fold:

Now I a four-fold vision see,And a four-fold vision is given to me;'Tis four-fold in my supreme delight,And three-fold in soft Beulah's nightAnd two-fold Always.-May God us keepFrom Single vision, and Newton's sleep. *

By "Newton's sleep" Blake referred toNewton's dictum "God can only be known

* Letter to Thomas Butts, 22nd, Nov., 1802.24


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THE TW O VISIONSby his attributes." The knowledge whichdepends on corporeal reason and experiment is a profound sleep when cornpared to the interior vision and soul-selfknowledge of the spiritually awake. Inthe quatrain of his" Auguries of Innocence"Blake again describes the vision which isthe native property of the unfallen soulof man:

To see a World in a Grain of Sand,And a Heaven in a Wild Flower;Hold infinity in the palm of your hand,And Eternity in an hour.

This vision man lost when he steppedfrom the State of Innocence into the Stateof Experience, when he began to taste theBread of Knowledge and put on the garment of his five-sensual body, which is alsohis tomb, from which, if he cannot transcendhis limitations whilst in the body, kindlydeath will release him to find Self-Knowledge in his interior faculties, which havelain buried since his entry into his materialForm.

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BLAKE ON THE LORD'S PRAYERThe human Form is a symbol, and a

symbol taken apart from its significationis an idol, and those who worship suchsymbols are idolators. Of such idolatrythe world of civilisation is full. Thesavage with his totems knows better.That Blake always saw the spirit within

the form is evident throughout his life,and his complaint against his age wasthat it was blind. In Art from his boy-hood the painters and poets who felt andsaw and interpreted the spiritual worldwere those who attracted him, and thosewhose works went no further than thedelineation of material forms were to himanathema. Raphael, Michael Angelo, andAlbrecht Durer were his heroes amongpainters and designers.

According to Blake there are in Manthree powers-Painting, Poetry andMusic-which have not been" swept awayby the flood of Time and Space," andby which it is still possible for man to"converse with Paradise." The Poet or

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THE TWO VISIONSthe inspired man, "Poietes"- the word isGreek,-is a "Maker" or "Creator," andthe Poetic Genius is the Inspiring Deity.Painting is the Art which speaks to manthrough the symbolism of Colour and Form.Music is the embodiment in sound of the"Word," the "Logos," whose utterancesare human beings.I have said something in this chapter

about the Egg and its Shell. One ofBlake's symbols for the entire materialuniverse is that of the Shell of the WorldEgg; he called the Visible Creation" TheMundane Shell." Inside this World-Shellthe Soul of Man is in process of beinghatched. Most people regard Creation asbeing an end in itself. That is not Blake'svision of Man: Creation for him is a Meansand not an End. Consequently those wholook for something finished and completein this phase of things are looking forsomething which is not there. A halfhatched chick is a sad looking object, but

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BLAKE ON THE LORD'S PRAYERit is only passing through a phase whichis essential to it before its perfect vehiclecan be attained. And that is precisely thestate in which Creation finds itself atpresent. Nevertheless, in the midst ofwhat appears to be almost pure chaos, theDivine Image still is there concealed, andthe Perfect Bird will emerge from its Shellwhen Hatching-Time is ripe.

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CHAPTER Ill.

JUST as truly as God made man in Hisown Image, so man makes his God in hisown image. If a man has a material mind,he will worship a material God. I f he hasa Satanic mind he will worship Satan. Ifhe has a sectarian mind he will create andworship a sectarian God. I f he has arevengeful nature he will create for himselfa god of vengeance and revenge. I f he isa Pharisee, his God will be a Pharisee. I f aman believes that his temporal personalityis all that there is of him he will fashionfor himself a corporeal limited deity. Ifhe imagines himself to be a thing de-

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BLAKE ON THE LORD'S PRAYERpendent on the personal favour of analmighty celestial monarch, his God willbe a magnified Augustus Caesar.

If, on the other hand, a man sees himselfa vital part of the Universe-a leaf onthe Tree of the Life of Infinity, of whichhe is an integral part-he will worship theUniversal Spirit of Divine Wisdom inwhom all things subsist. It was Blake'scomplaint against his age that it had puta limit on deity and had thus becomeitself limited, according to the ancientoccult maxim that a man" becomes" thatwhich he "beholds," the" eyes" being the"instrument" of "marriage" and sightbeing the mystical sense. It had been pro-phesied, he wrote, that all the world wouldbecome subject to the Jews, and this, hesaid, is exactly what has come to pass, for"all the world believes the jews' code andworships the jews' god, and," he asks,"what greater subjection can be?"The" Code of the Jew" will be dealtwi th in the following chapter; suffice it to

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say here that Blake refers chiefly to theTen Commandments (which are, in asense, the antithesis of the Lord's Prayer)and the pharisaic doctrine that man (andconsequently his God) can have a self-hoodseparate from the Universal Will. Theresult of this is that the Jew has createdfor himself-and, alas! for us-a pharisaicGod whom Blake has depicted in his greatdesigns of Urizen, the" Accuser of Sins,"the "God of this World," who has entangled h u m a n i t y - a n d finally himself-inhis net of Druidic religion which demandsthe sacrifice of others, in contradistinctionto the Christian religion which demandsthe sacrifice of self,

It is an unfortunate complication of truevision that names have, to a very largeextent, taken the place of actualities, thatthe shadow man is mistaken-by himselfand others-for the essential being, andthat an infinite number of persons whothink themselves Christians are actuallyworshippers at the shrine of Satan.

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BLAKE ON THE LORD'S PRAYERIn the Epilogue to his poem, "The

Gates of Paradise," Blake thus addresses"The Accuser of Sins, who is the God ofthis Wodd" :

Truly, My Satan, thou art but a DunceAnd dost not know the Garment from the Man.Every Harlot was a Virgin onceNor canst thou ever change Kate into Nan.Though thou are worshipped by the Names DivineOf Jesus and Jehooali, thou art stillThe Son of Man at weary night's decline,The lost traveller's dream under the hill.The italics are mine. TheVerse is accom-

panied by a design of.the "Lost-Traveller"under Sinai's Hill, whose dream is Lucifer.This is another way of putting into wordsthe gospel saying that not all who say" LordLord" will' find themselves acknowledged.A prologue to the same poem "The Keys

of the Gates" opens with these words;-Mutual forgiveness of each vice-Such are the Gates of Paradise.

-which, again, are a translation of a clausein the Lord's Prayer. No man can forgive

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THE JE\\TS' GODhis own sins, any more than a man wi th onlyone hand can cut his own finger-nails. For-giveness relates to a second person. TheForgiveness of Sins which Christianity enjoins is not getting forgiveness for one's ownsins, but granting forg-iveness to those whohave injured us. And since each individualis an integral part of the Universe, and as theUniverse consists of one's own self and allthe other selves, in forgiving others we areactually forgiving our greater" self."There can be, therefore, no admission toParadise except through the Gates of theForgiveness of others, which is a doctrinedirectly opposed to the Spirit of the TenCommandments, which Blake calls" TheAccuser's chief desire": and the Prologueto the same Poem concludes with thiscouplet relating to the "dead corpse" ofthese " stony commands" :-

Oh Christians! Christians! tell me whyYou rear it on your Altars high?

-a question, by the way, which has neverbeen answered.

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BLAKE ON THE LORD'S PRAYER"Bible history" is universally recognised

to be something very different from thatwhich is generally known as "history"outside the Bible. In point of fact it isnot history at all, and only touches thewritten and recorded histories of thenations at certain points. The Jews claimfor themselves a miraculous origin just assome other races do. But there is thisdifference. Other nations, with their fabledancestral gods and demi-gods have leftsome tangible evidences of their powerand greatness in the monumental buildings,temples and inscriptions which remainwith us to this day. Even the cave menhave done this much, but the Jews havenot one stone with one Hebrew inscriptionto show of their legendary heroes.The real origin of the wandering tribe

which has scattered itself all over theworld will perhaps never be settled. Somesay their progenitors came from the provinceof Oude in India and from this were named" Ioudaioi" by the Greeks. They boast

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THE JEWS' GODthat they are all descended from the patriarch Abraham, but this is clearly confutedin the New Testament, and St. Paulroundly says that the story of Abrahamand his two wives and two sons is anallegory with a spiritual meaning. Thevery name of their putative parent is suggestive of Brahma and the ancient Brahmins of India. "A -Braham" is, in fact,"Brahm-a," and the Jews have as muchright to "take the name to themselves as.they have to take the names of "Montagu"and"Montmorency."One great function and service of the

Jews in the world is that of being theWorld's great collectors. They have aperfect genius for collecting and preservingthe works of other peoples, whether literaryor artistic. For this function they areeminently qualified on account of thehighly mixed nature of their race andblood.When a man boasts of a certain thingwe may be pretty certain that this is his

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BLAKE ON THE LORD'S PRAYERweakest spot. I t is the same with a race,and t h e " Children of Abraham" myth isa case in point. The late Mr. IsraelZangwill,-who, by the way, has given usa very graphic description of the characterof his race in his poem "Israel"-hasdescribed America as b ein g " The Melting-pot of the Nations." But the descriptionapplies much more exactly to his ownrace. I t might be truly called a " melted-pot of Asiatic and African races." Pales-tine, which Jews call theirs, never wasinhabited by them as a pure tribe. Theland has always been a sort of" Macedonia."But apart from that, as long as there isany record of them in profane history theyhave been a scattered tribe, polygamouswherever polygamy has been the custom,and at one time, at least, an entire tribeof Tartars was absorbed into this melting-pot. The admixture of negro blood inthe Jews is very evident in many Jewishindividuals whom we constantly meet inour streets, and medical investigators who

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THE JEWS' GODexamined the blood of the various com-ponents of the forces engaged in theMesopotamian campaign found abundantblack elements in the blood of all theJews examined. The fact that someJews of Asia and Africa are as blackas the darkest negroes, and that allshades of colour exist within the tribe,is another evidence that the tribe itself,as it exists at present, is a "Macedoine"of humanity.This fact accounts for the extraordinaryversatility of the Jew, and it may "alsoaccount for the characteristic above referredto, that of being the collector and preserverof the works and treasures of other peoples.Among these collections are some of themyths of the ancient world, a number ofwhich are contained in the books of theOld Testament.That the Jews are a people who origin-

ally possessed a language of their own,Hebrew to wit, is one of the notions whichthey have industriously spread, but there

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BLAKE ON THE LORD'S PRAYERis no evidence that such was ever the case.The nearest thing to a language of theirown which they ever have possessed isYiddish, and that is a mixture like therace itself, a German dialect written inHebrew characters and read from rightto left. Hebrew itself is a hieratic languageoriginating in Egypt, written withoutvowels or stops. The Jews in adoptingit as their own sacred language gave itsome of their own characteristics andintroduced "points" and stops to bringit into line with other languages. Butthereby they corrupted it as they corrupteverything corruptible which they touch.In ancient days Aramaic and not Hebrewwas the principal language they spoke.

How far the scriptures, gathered f:ommany sources, which we now know as theOld Testament, were originally Jewishwill, in all probability, never be known.But much of it has, in the process ofadoption, acquired characteristics whichare undoubtedly Jewish. Translation into

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THE JEWS' GODGreek in the Septuagint, has, perhaps,modified this somewhat, and, again, bytranslation into continental languagesfurther modification has been effected.The various Councils of the Church whichsettled the Canon of the Scriptures ex-eluded much which is now collected in the"Apocrypha." The English Version, whichwas made at a period when our languagewas at its perfection, has communicatedto the Old Testament much of the spiritand piety of our race and a dignity ofstyle which is an incomparable treasure.

But all this could not alter or eliminatethe character of the Jewish deity. What-ever Jewry touches it materialises. What-ever Jewry tells us its laws command it todo, that we may be certain it is leavingundone, and whatever it is ordered toavoid that we know is the very thingwhich we are sure to find it engaged in.

The consequence of this has been thatall the documents which have come intothe possession of Jewry have received a

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BLAKE ON THE LORD'S PRAYERmaterial interpretation at their hands, andall the world which has accepted thisinterpretation has come under the spell.The early chapters of the Book of

Genesis, which deal with a myth of pro-found spiritual significance, have beenmade out to contain a "history" of theorigin of this particular globe and of theJewish race as its heirs apparent, and allthe ingenuity of theologians has been bentto the task of endeavouring to make arespectable human entity out of thematerialised deity which the Jews havecreated for themselves. Not being them-selves capable of seeing"Man," but only his"garment,"-only the visible part of hisbody which he leaves behind him atdeath, and not at all the invisible organ-ism of which this is no more than theshadow,-not being able to perceive thesoul and spirit of Man which never weregenerated, or, as Blake calls it, "vegetated,"and which never can die, they could nothelp producing a God who is partial, who

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THE JEWS' GODcares for the material welfare of the Jewsand their advancement in worldly pos-sessions above all other peoples, and whotakes vengeance on the peoples who resenttheir religion, and on themselves if theydo not keep his laws. And as these laws areof such a nature that they cannot be kept, ascheme of forgiveness is arranged for themby which they can obtain it through thecruel sacrifice of innocent animals.Of course the" animals" which man hasto sacrifice are the animal desires and

passions in his own organism. It is onlyin this way that he can approach to thehighest sphere in his own being. Theonly Paradise man ever had or ever willhave is in his own mind and brain, wherealso may be seen the Tree of Life and theRivers which water it. The Holy Landand the Throne of Divinity are to be foundin the Heart of Humanity and all the warsand horrors which have followed the de-lusion that Deity favours one spot of earthmore than another, and loves one man's

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BLAKE ON THE LORD'S PRAYERprogeny more than another man's, mighthave been spared mankind if it had not beenfor the materialising of spiritual thingswrought by the tribe which boasts itselfas being the Chosen of its God.The English reader of the Bible uncon-

sciously, or consciously, reads into theBible stories a spiritual meaning, but forall that he cannot get away from thedominance of the Jews' Satanic God.

I t is belief in this God which is theparent of almost all the" Atheism" of thepresent day, and it is disbelief in thedivinity of Man which is the parent of thisinhuman Jewish idol.The Jews' God is his tribe personified.

The tribe itself is the unit, not the m-dividual as with more evolved races.

That God does and always did converse withhonest men Paine never denies. He only deniesthat God conversed with Murderers and Revengerssuch as the Jews were, and of course he holds thatthe Jews conversed with their State Religion whicbthey called God and so were liars as Christ said.

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THE JEWS' GODThis is Blake's way of putting it. And

in the Preface to the Third Book ofJerusalem he shows how easy it is to COD.-found the two religions :-

Man must and will have Some Religion j if hehas not the Religion of Jesus, he will havethe Religion of Satan, and will erect the Synagogueof Satan, calling the Prince of this World, God, anddestroying all who do not worship Satan under thename of God. Will anyone say, "Where arethose who worship Satan under the Name of God?"Where are they? Listen! Every Religion thatPreaches Vengeance for Sin is the Religion of theEnemy and Avenger; and not of the Forgiver ofSins, and their God is Satan, Named by the DivineName. Your Religion 0 Deists! Deism is theworship of the God of this World by the means ofwhat you call Natural Religion and Natural Philosophy, and of Natural Moralitv or Self-Righteousness,the Selfish VIrtues of the Natural Heart. This wasthe Religion of the Pharisees who murdered Jesus,In the Jewish World of 15th March, 1925,

an inspired writer expressed the sameeternal truth thus-" Fundamentally Judaism is Anti-Christian,"

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CHAPTER IV.TH E JEWS' CODE

IT is the aim of the Jew to make Gentilesbelieve that the writings of the Old Tes-

tament contain the religion of the Jew in itscompleteness; that all the pious reverencewhich Christians give to the Old Testament,especially to the Psalms and the Prophets,is shared with them by the Jews, and thatthey and the Jews are a t one in thatrespect. A closer reading of passages inDeuteronomy and elsewhere would revealthe error of this notion. When the Jew istold that he may practise usury on Gentilesbut not on Jews; that he is not to eat theflesh of a ni ma ls w hi ch have died a naturaldeath, but that he may feed the stranger

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THE JEWS' CODEwithin his gates on it, and he may evensell it to a Gentile outsider, the principlethat the Jews' God has one law for theJew and another for the Gentile is revealedbeyond the possibility of spiritualisingaway.But the Old Testament, with its double

morality and its Ten Commandments is,after all, not the first or the last word inthe Code of the Jew. That is to be foundin the Talmud. The Old Testament isnothing to the Jew apart from the glosses andsophistications of the ancient scribes andrabbis who compiled this amazing work.It is amazing in its bestialities, itssophistriesand its blasphemies. But it is the realCode of the Jew for all that. The tribeboasts that in presenting the world withthe Ten Commandments it really inventedthe moral sense, and it celebrates annuallythe compliment its God paid to it on thealleged day of the alleged month when"the law" was "given" to the Jews byMoses on Mount Sinai. The" Giving of

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BLAKE ON THE LORD'S PRAYERthe Law" is one of the principal feasts ofthe jews' year.The strength of a chain is the strength

of its weakest link. The Talmud maycontain moral and humanitarian maxims,and these same maxims may be taught toJewish children in their Talmud Torahs.But the Talmud is a secret book and notintended for Gentile consumption.The fundamental difference between the

Jew and the Christian is shown in nothingmore clearly than in the way in whichthey severally treat their sacred books.The Christian believes the written Word ofhis Scriptures to contain the only methodby which the soul of the individual can besaved from destruction. It is, therefore,natural for him to do his best to spread theBook, through which he believes he hasfound nourishment for his soul, throughoutthe world in all the languages man speaks.The Jews' method is the opposite of allthis. The Talmud is not to be found on

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THE JEWS' CODEJews to provide the world with it gratis,or translate it into all the tongues. If thiswere done it is safe to say the world wouldsoon make an end of the Jewish" religion,"if not of the Tribe itself.Among its many boasts- --for Jewry can

only live among the nations by perpetualboasting and advertisement of its supposedvirtues-is this, that it is "The people ofthe Book." By this it is intended to makeGentiles believe that the" Book" of whichit is "the people" is the Old Testamentwhich they also revere. But that is not atall the case. The" Book" of which theyare "the people" is their Talmud. Andthe Talmud is also their" fatherland," andnot Palestine, nor Poland, nor Johannes-burg, nor even New York. The Jew poet,Heine, well said that the Jews have a" portable fatherland," their" Torah."

How fatally this Torah has infectedChristianity and its Churches is revealedin another inspired saying of this sameJew. "Puritanism," he said, "is only

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BLAKE ON THE LORD'S PRAYERJudaism with the addition of a license toeat pork." I t is the deliverance of men'sminds and souls from the blight of thispuritan mentality which Blake felt himselfinspired to effect. His poem "Milton" isdevoted to this object. He felt that Miltoncame to him in spirit in order to urge himto undo the injury wrought by the doctrinesof his great poems. The austere religionof the Pilgrim Fathers is depicted for usby Nathaniel Hawthorne in his novel "TheScarlet Letter." The puritan deity of theWelsh Calvinists is portrayed in the terriblebooks of Caradoc Evans. The Puri tanCromwell,-glorified in recent years by theScotch Puritan, Carlyle,-a man of bloodand iron, who was financed by Jews andwho employed them as his spies, paid thetribe for their services to himself by handing over to them England-England whichhad been free from them since the daysof King Edward 1., one of the very greatestrulers England ever possessed. It is notwithout significance that a Scottish Primier

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THE JEWS' CODEof England, the son-in-law of a Rothschild..has erected a statue to Cromwell in Westminster, but the instinct of the nationrefused to allow it to be placed within theHouse of England's Parliament, and it has;to be content with a place in an areaoutside.The essence of puritanism is that it is areligion of self-righteousness as is Judaism.And puritanism is not confined to anyChurch. Rome no less than Geneva hasproduced examples in abundance of votariesat the shrine of Sinai, which demandsthat humanity shall be ordered by someexternal God to obey certain laws and beschooled into obedience to them. Only byso doing can the crown of self-righteous.ness be obtained. The inspired puritan,Bunyan, revolted against the creed in hisepic story of the Pilgrim, and beautifullydescribed the religion of Sinai as the burning mountain to the foot of which Christianwas seduced by "Mr. Worldly Wiseman" ofthe" Village of Morality."

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BLAKE ON THE LORD'S PRAYERAccording to Blake "obedience" can

make no man" good." Virtue comes fromwithin. "Religion" as popularly under-stood is imposed from without in "stony"laws and commands. Blake said it wasabsurd to take" laws of prudence and callthem laws of God." "Prudence," he said,"is a rich, ugly old maid courted byIncapacity"; all Christ's acts arose from"impulse" and not from obedience to laws.The fact is, the "law of God" is notwritten on any tables of stone or on tables

of any material thing. It is written in theessence of things, in the heart and con-science of humanity. It is written in theprogress of the sun through the twelvesigns of the Zodiac. It is revealed in everygrain of sand, and in every herb and tree,in every animal, and every man. It hasmany forms and has received many names,the" force of gravity" being one of them,"attraction and repulsion" being another," polarity" another, manifesting as "maleand female," "right and left," "love and

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THE JEWS' CODEhate," "positive and negative"-but not asU good and evil." "I care not," says Blakein the words of one of his creations,11whether a man is good or evil. All Icare is whether he is a wise man or a fool; "and in another passage he says, 11Thecombats of good and evil is eating thefruit of the Tree of Death. The combatsof Truth and Error is eating of the Tree ofLife." Blake saw Humanity whole and notin the sections which the Five Sensesnecessarily impose on those whose vision isconfined to what they show. He sawMan's corporeal Reason claiming for itselfa separate self-hood and falling by thisvery claim, into division-into creation,in fact.

The claim of the Jews that" inspiration"ended with the last book of the Old Testament, and of Christians that it endedwith the Book of Revelation, was regardedas blasphemy by Blake. According to himthere is nothing of permanent value in lifethat is not the fruit of inspiration. "The

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BLAKE ON THE LORD'S PRAYERdaughters of Memory," the inspirers ofclassic poetry, were to him of very minorconsequence. "The daughters of Inspiration" were his only loves. "There is noGod," he exclaims, "but that God who isthe Intellectual fountain of Humanity."To put a limit on the capacities of theGreat Humanity Divine is the direstblasphemy; as disbelief in Humanity is theworst form of Atheism.

Thou art a Man. God is no more.Thine own Humanity learn to adore.

The puritanic divinity is the SatanicUrizen, become a self-hood and demandingrighteousness and obedience to his stonycommands.But these stony commands, which, to

Blake's horror, Christians raise on theirhigh altars, are after all not so lowas the Code of the Rabbis. The poetGoethe said of the first of these same commands, "Thou shalt not kill," that therewas no tribe on earth except the Jews who

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THE JEWS' CODEwere base enough to require to be toldthat. But the Rabbis are not contentwith even that. Their gloss upon it is thatit only means "Thou shalt not kill a Jew."In the words of the Talmud (Tosefta, AbdaZara VIII,5.) " I f a Gentile kills a Jew heis responsible, but if a Jew kills a Gentilehe is not responsible."

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CHAPTER V:GOOD AND EVILI HAVE already referred to the passagefrom Blake in which he says that" the

combats of Good and Evil is eating of thefruit of the Tree of Death." I t is necessaryto be a little more explicit on this matteror we shall not be able to follow muchof his thought." Good" and" Evil" are purely relativequalities. They are not essential actuali

ties but depend entirely on the illusionof the separate self. The source of evilresides in the belief in self-hood. Selfdenial does not mean abstaining fromsome favourite indulgence and giving theproceeds to a good object j it means

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GOOD AND EVILdenying that our self-hood has any realexistence at all. This belief-the beliefthat our mortal, temporal self-hood hasany essential separate reality-is the evilbelief from which we are to pray to bedelivered.Man's personal ego belongs to time, and

Time-Kronos-Saturn-is the devourerof all its children. The dark triangle isthe reflexion in Time of the white triangle,which is the real, essential, eternal, infiniteMan. The light of the moon has in itselfno essential reality as originating in andfrom the moon. It is a reflexion only ofthat which issues from the sun. Themoon is the symbol of Nature as the Sunis the symbol of eternity. Man is an Eternalbut the Spirit of man has been so longimprisoned in a vehicle derived from Time,that it has come to believe it is itself achild of Time. But man's Spirit may beconsciously, if it so wills, a child of Eterni ty, knowing itself to be such, endowedwith, and not imprisoned in, a vehicle of

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BLAKE ON THE LORD'S PRAYERTime, through which it may gather experience - its Daily Bread - and attaingrowth until it expands into its own properinfinite divine dimensions and recognisesItself."The combats of Truth and Error is

eating of the fruit of the Tree of Life."The great error, the original Lie, is thebelief that the Spiri t of man is mortal,that his vehicle is himself. It is the beliefof the blood-corpuscle that it is somethingin itself, and is separate from the life andspirit of the organism which has producedit. Every sin which man has committedor can commit has arisen from this poisonous lie. This is at once the serpent andthe apple, and it is to be found in theparadise of every man and woman born.I t is in fighting this error that man gainslife and strength throughout his existencein Time, and when Time has devoured allthat is temporal, and therefore its own, inhis constitution, Man will then haverecovered his lost freedom, his raised body

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GOOD AND EVILwill have been freed from material limita-tions, his Paradise will have been regained.For everything which has been or can

be created must be annihilated. Onlythat which is wholly pure and divinecan endure.

The fighting of this primeval Error iswhat Blake calls Spiritual Warfare, andSpiritual Warfare gives life as temporalwarfare gives death. That is what hemeans in the line "I will not cease frommental fight." For it is the mind of Manwhich is the arena of the battle. Man'smind is the meeting place between the soulof nature and the soul of immortality, andit is there that the conflict occurs.The cardinal error of the Garden of

Eden is nowhere more vividly manifestedthan in the belief that the Scriptures are"history." They are just as true and justas little historical as are the events ofBunyan's inspired dream. We are ex-plicitly told that" The letter killeth" and

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BLAKE ON THE LORD'S PRAYERthat it is the spirit and the letter, the.spiritual interpretation, which gives life.And yet we have all the Christian Churches,and all the sects, from their temporal andmortal readings of the letter of Scriptureas if it were history, claiming that theyalone are right, and making war upon oneanother on the basis of that misunderstanding. I t is on this misunderstandingalone that the Tribe of modern Jewryclaims to have rights to a land which isnot theirs, and it is this which is setting thenations of the world at loggerheads throughChristians' adoption of this false view,a view inspired by the tribe itself.The adoption by Christians of the Jews'god for their own deity has led to most of

the trouble which confronts the Churchesand sects to-day. An extra-cosmic deitywith a limited personality who can beangry and jealous, and can be placatedlike any Czesar is the god the Jews haveplanted on the Christian world.

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GOOD AND EVILTo Blake God was no extra-cosmic,

external deity, but was part of Man asMan is part God-as a single cell of man'sbody is part of the organism of the Man.As the universe of Matter is the body ofdeity made manifest, so the physical bodyof man is the visible part of man's souland spirit. In Blake's vision man's spiritis infinite as God is infinite, and the factthat it has a physical vehicle does notlimit it thereto. Blake perceives that manhas to be awakened from his deadly sleepin which he dreams that he is limited;he perceives that man is Spirit as God isSpirit, manifested in Time and crucifiedin Matter; that Spirit is all and thatMatter is Spirit condensed; that" Adam"is the" limit of contraction " - " shrunk upto a little root, a fathom long,"-and that"Satan" is the" limit of opacity" throughwhich no spiritual light can penetrate.

We say" the pen writes"; but the pendoes not wri te, neither does the hand write

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BLAKE ON THE LORD'S PRAYERwith the pen. I t is the spirit whichwrites, passing "through the portals ofthe brain down the right arm." We sayU the tongue talks"; but the tongue doesnot talk, only the spiri t talks through theinstrumentality of the tongue. The spiritof man is infinite, but being U drowned inthe deluge of Time and Space" it nolonger knows itself, except by flashes, andimagines itself to be the vehicle in whichit works. This is the outer self, theshadow self, on the digestion, extinction,and annihilation of which its own resur-rection depends.That Christianity has survived in spiteof the enthronement of the Jews' god of

this World is due to the fact that the reasonof the outer senses on which the existenceof the Jews' god depends is not the con-trolling power wi th most Christians.Happily, logic is not their strong point.I t is possible to hold a number of mutuallycontradictory" beliefs" without our notic-ing the fact. The organism which is

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GOOD AND EVILpopularly known as the sub-conscious, orthe sub-liminal self-the one which transmutes the bread we eat into blood and boneswithout our knowing i t - is also capable ofdoing many other things quite regardless ofwhat the logical faculty may approve.Thus it comes about that the interiorfaculties of Man may attain to substantialtruth whilst correct logic based on faulty orimperfect data may lead only to error. "Allreligions are one," says Blake, and the samemay be said of all churches and all sects.They are so many different approaches tothe Temple ofTruth, created by and adaptedto the particular limitations of the mindsof their adherents. " Religion "-fromreligera-is, or should be, the binding ofman back to his source in the Supreme. Butin ordinary use the word" religion" connotes much that is the opposite of this,and in Blake's writings the word almostexclusively refers to this bad sense. I t isa power which "binds," truly enough, butinstead of uniting the shadow ego with

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BLAKE ON THE LORD'S PRAYERthe Supreme Power from which it originated, it seeks to bind the infinite withinthe terms of the finite, with its "Thoushalt," and its "Thou shalt not," untilthe " Mistaken Demon" of the Jews' god isenthroned as the World Power.

The Moral Law of Sinai-" one law forthe lion and the ox, which is oppression"-is the outcome of this code. Not that theScribes of Jewry are content with TenCommandments, their Talmud has multiplied them till they now number Sixhundred and thirteen. Virtue, says Blake,is something positive and infinite and nota thing which can be codified andrestrained. The word "Virtue" is derivedfrom Vir-" Man "-and connotes all thatis of true manhood and manliness."Morality" is something of a very differentorder. It belongs to " manners "-moresas "ethics" - Ta eeL/Ca _. belongs to "customs," and is of the earth, earthy. Whatis "moral" in one part of the world is"immoral" in another part. The old

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GOOD AND EVILSunday-school division of humanity into" good men" and" bad men" belongs to thisorder, and derives from the shadow-consciousness of man, and not from his divinecentre, from the illusory aspect of the temporal, and not from the eternal in Man.

Charles Kingsley betrayed the Jewishstrain in him when he wrote the words:

"Be good, sweet maid, and let whowill be clever."

Outside a nursery or a Sunday School itis impossible to "be good" to order, as itis impossible to "be happy" to order anywhere. Righteousness is a perfectly impossible ideal in this shadow phase ofexistence, but Truth is not; and theseparation of Truth from error is the primefunction of life on this plane.Although overwhelmed in the Deluge of

Time and Space, Man's spirit is not dead.In fact there could be no life if it were. Inspite of the domination of the temporal,illusory ego, the real ego is ever coming tothe surface in Man's mind.

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BLAKE ON THE LORD'S PRAYERIt is to the temporal plane that the dis-

tinction between "good" and " evil"belongs, and it is the eating of the fruitof the Tree which gives the consciousnessof this difference that brings experience;and experience eventually leads to thedeath of the illusion. The warfare of thespirit of man against acceptance of theillusion for the real is eating of the Treeof Life. Blake felt it to be his mission,his order, his instruction, his inspirationto show the world that the cherubic guardat the Tree of Life was now removed byhis writings, and that the eating of thefruit of the Tree of Life was henceforthopen to alL

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CHAPTER VI.BLAKE'S GOD

ALMOST two centuries before Blakeappeared on this scene, there was born

another seer of visions, Jacob Boehme.Boehme was born in 1575, Blake in 1757.Both were" uneducated" in the ordinarysense of that much abused word, Boehmebeing a shoemaker and Blake never havingbeen to school. But both were endowedwith the faculty of soul-vision, which seesthrough and not with the mortal eye, andboth were able to understand the thingsof man's true nature, the things of theSpirit which is the child of eternity, and isonly a traveller through Time:

This life's five windows of the soulDistorts the heauens from pole to pole,And leads you to believe a lieWhen you see with, not through the eye,Which was born in a night, to perish in a night,When the soul slept in beams of light.

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BLAKE ON THE LORD'S PRAYERThat is to say, if we take that which the soulcan perceive through the limited externalsenses as being All, we believe a lie andall our apprehensions of spiritual t h i n g s " t h e heavens "-are "distorted from poleto pole."

When a man believes that his temporal,personal self is all that there is of him, heshuts himself out from his own eternal lifeand adopts an animal existence.

The seer does not require to be convincedby argument and reasoning-he has visionand knows. There is an occult saying thata man becomes what he beholds. I f he onlysees external things he is an external, if hesees the soul of the living universe he be-comes himself a living soul. If he sees onlya m at er ia l w or ld he is himself material, ifhe sees infinite divinity in everything, heis himself infinite and divine. I f he seesGod in Man, Man becomes God. The In-carnation and the Crucifixion are bothcomprised in th e sa yin g t h a t " God becameas we are that we might be as He is."

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BLAKE'S GODThe fundamental difficulty with the

conception of the deity entertained by themajority of Christians is that they acceptthe Jewish idea that God is "SomebodyElse," and not all that is real and permanent of themselves. I t has been saidthat the Rugby Arnolds are of Jewishextraction, but whether that is so or not,the poet of the family, Matthew Arnold,certainly revealed oriental traits. In thefamous phrase in which he described thedeity as " A power not ourselveswhich makesfor Righteousness" he spoke as the Jewsthink and speak. Blake's God was our veryself, our only real self. Tennyson had thetrue conception with his" Closer is He thanbreathing; nearer than hands and feet."

Again, Matthew Arnold is Jewish in hisputting" Righteousness" as the end and aimof all things. This is Blake's " Urizen "-"Your Reason"-who claimed for himselfa separate self-hood and exalted himselfover all that is called God and so introduced disorder into the Cosmos.

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BLAKE ON THE LORD'S PRAYERAn exclusively literal reading of the Bible

makes it appear that Man is one and thatGod is Somebody Else. When we read"The Lord said unto Moses," or when aProphet says" Thus saith the Lord," weimagine that some external deity waspresent and ordered his" servants" to sayor write as he dictated. This is the" distortion of the heavens" of which Blakecomplained. For him there was only oneGod, who is the Inspirer of Poets andProphets, and who always has been" the"Intellectual fountain of Humanity." Forhim the "Heavens" were in the soul ofevery Man and nowhere else; man is notseparate from God, and God is not separatefrom man.Consciousness is Being. Where and whatman's consciousness is there and that is he.If man's consciousness is fixed in that partof himself which is limited, in his temporalpersonality which has a name in theworld's directory, his God is necessarilyalso a limited Being, such as is the Jews'

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BLAKE'S GODGod, which has been imposed upon andaccepted by the bulk of Christianity.

I t may be well in this connection toreproduce three aphoristic statementsengraved by Blake in the early part of hiscareer. They may be called three, althoughthe second is a second edition and ampli-fication of the first. The title of the twois "There is no natural Religion."In Blake's day the rationalising section

of the intellectual world endeavoured tomake out that Religion was a matter ofReason and was evolved from Nature.Nature became a divinity to be worshipped,and this was supported by the poetWordsworth with his laudation of"Natural Piety." To Blake, this was error:there is no such thing, he said, as "NaturalReligion," Nature itself being derived, anda creation of the five senses. The worshipof "Reason" based on the knowledgederived from the five senses alone was theworship of Satan, the limiting principle,which imposes a separate selfhood on man.

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BLAKE ON THE LORD'S PRAYERHere follow the three statements :-

ITHERE IS NO NATURAL RELIGION

(FIRST SERIX,)Etched about 1789

The Argument: Man has no notion of moral fitnessbut from Education. Naturally he is only a naturalorgan subject to sense.

I. Man cannot naturally Perceive but through hisnatural or bodily organs.II. Man by reasoning power can only compare andjudge of what he has already perceived.Ill. From a perception of only three senses or three

elements none could deduce a fourth or fifth.IV. None could have other than natural or organic

thoughts if he had none but organic perceptions.V. Man's desires are limited by his perceptions, none

can desire what he has Dot perceived.VI. The desires and perceptions 01 man, untaught

by anything but organs of sense, must be limited toobjects of sense.

Conclllsion.-If it were not for the Poetic or Propheticcharacter, the Philosophic and Experimental would soonbe at the ratio of all things, and stand still, unable to doother than repeat the same dull round over again.

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BLAKE'S GOD

IITHERE IS NO NATURAL RELIGION

(SECOND SJo:RIES)Etched about 1789

I. Man's perceptions are not bounded by organs ofperception; he perceives more than sense (though everso acute) can discover.

I l , Reason, or the ratio of all we have alreadyknown, is not the same as it shall be when we knowmore.

I l l . [This proposition has been lost.]IV. The bounded is loathed by its possessor. Thesame dull round, even of a universe, would soon becomea mill with complicated wheels.

V. I f the many become the same as the few whenpossessed. More! More! is the cry of the mistakensoul; less than ALL cannot satisfy Man.

V.!. I f any could desire what he is incapable ofpossessing, despair must be his eternal lot.VII. The desire of Man being Infinite, the possession

is Infinite and himself Infinite.Application.-He who sees the Infinite in all things,

sees God. He who sees the Ratio only, sees himselfonly.Therefore God becomes as we are, that we may be asHe is.

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BLAKE ON THE LORD'S PRAYERIII

ALL RELIGIONS ARE ONEEtched about 1789

THE VOICE OF ONE CRYING IN THE WILDERNESSThe A rgument.-As the true method of knowledge

is experiment, the true faculty of knowing must be thefaculty which experiences. This faculty I treat of.

PRINCIPLE. 1ST. That the Poetic Genius is the trueMan, and that the body or outward form of Man isderived from the Poetic Genius. Likewise that theforms of all things are derived from their Genius, whichby the Ancients was called an Angel end Spirit andDemon.

PRINCIPLE 2ND. As all men are alike in outward form,So (and with the same infinite variety) all are alike inthe Poetic Genius.

PRINCIPLE 3RD. No man can think, write, or speakfrom his heart, but he must intend truth. Thus all sectsof Philosophy are from the: Poetic Genius adapted tothe weaknesses of every individual.

PRINCIPLE 4TH. As none by travelling over knownlands can find out the unknown, So from alreadyacquired knowledge Man could not acquire more:therefore an universal Poetic Genius exists.

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BLAKE'S GODPRINCIPLE 5TH. The Religions of all Nations are

derived from each Nation's different reception of thePoetic Genius, which is everywhere called the Spirit ofProphecy.

PRINCIPLE 6TH. The Jewi ...h and Christian Testa-ments are an original derivation from the PoeticGenius; this is necessary from the confined nature ofbodily sensation.

PRINCIPLE 7TH. As all men are alike (though infinitelyvarious), So all Religious and, as all sirnilars, haveone source.

The true Man is the source, he being the PoeticGenius.

It may be helpful to quote here threepassages from thewritings of Jacob Boehme,which I will take from Dr. Hartmann'svolume."To believe merely in a historical Christ,to be satisfied with the belief that at sometime in the past Jesus died to satisfythe anger of God, does not constitute aChristian. Such a speculative Christianevery devil may be, for everyone wouldlike to obtain, without any effort of his

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BLAKE ON THE LORD'S PRAYERown, something good which he does notdeserve. But that which is born from theflesh cannot enter the Kingdom of God.To enter that Kingdom one must be rebornin the Spirit." (p. 19)"The theologians and sectarians keep

on continually disputing about the letterand form, while they care nothing for thespirit, without which the form is emptyand the letter dead. Each one imaginesthat he has the truth in his keeping andwants to be admired by the world asa keeper of the tru th. As theIsraelites dance around the golden calf, sothe modern Christians dance around theirself-constructed fetishes whom they callGod, and on account of this fetish-worshipthey will not be able to enter the promisedland." (p. 20)Here is another passage which illustrates

Blake's saying that to see "with" thecorporeal eye and not" through" it is to" believe a lie."

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BLAKE'S GOD"The superficial reasoner believes that

there exists no faculty of seeing except bythe exterior eye, and that if that sighthas departed there will be an end of seeing.It is very unfortunate if the soul can onlysee through the external mirror of the eye.What will such a soul see if that mirror isbroken? " (p. 2)

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CHAPTER VII.IDOL WORSHIP

WE are told in scripture t h a t " The letterkilleth, but the Spirit giveth Life,"

but this is a scripture which very fewChristians believe. " The Bible, the wholeBible, and nothing but the Bible," is thecry, and by " t h e Bible" they mean theliteral written word, that every word andevery letter (especially in the AuthorisedEnglish version) has come by direct inspira-tion. The acceptance of this view has ledto the creation of all the sects, which arebased on different interpretations of somany different passages. There was sometruth in the jibe that in his Reformationre-formation-Luther had only exchanged

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IDOL WORSHIPthe Pope of Rome for a Paper Pope, whichhe set up in place of the other. Blake saidof Voltaire that with all his ribaldry he hadat least done Christianity this enormousservice, that he had destroyed the tyrannyof the written word as exalted above itsspiri t.There is only one Scripture which cannot

be falsified and that is to be read in thehandwriting of Nature. I t is written inthe story of the rocks, of the plants andthe animal world; and workers in this fieldhave done much to complete the work ofVoltaire in destroying the tyranny of thisverbal idol. I t is just as easy to make anidol of the Bible itself and commit the sinof idolatry-Bibliolatry-in its worship, asit is to make and worship idols of woodand stone. The Scriptures, in so far asthey are pure, are spiritual and mystic.But they are a human production and ahuman collection at best, and thus cannotbe free from the errors to which humanhandiwork is prone.

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BLAKE ON THE LORD'S PRAYERBut whatever they may be, they are

certainly not History, Geography, Bio-graphy or Science, and to worship them assuch is a most deadly form of idol worship.

I t has been said that you cannot make areligion out of a history. This is true;but all the same the bulk of the Christianworld are guilty of this very same speciesof idolatry.

A friend of the writer's, the late EdwinJohnson, an eminent Nonconformist scholar,and a professor in a theological college, notbeing satisfied with all the evidences ofso-called" Bible history" available, askedleave of his college authorities to travel tothe centres where the great libraries of theworld were to be consulted, including thatof the Vatican. He spent two years on thetask and the result is to be found in hisbooks" Antiqua Mater" and" The Rise ofChristendom." His researches had theresult of robbing him of his position.Because his faith having been pinned on to abelief that the Bible was" historic," when

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IDOL VV'ORSHIPhe made the discovery that it is not, hecould no longer fill a chair in an establishment which required that it should betaught.Neither is the Bible a book to be

consulted on Geography any more thanis Bunyan's "Pilgrim's Progress," withi ts" City of Destruction," its "village ofMorality," its" town of Fair-speech" and its"Vanity Fair." An American who had allhis life placed his faith in the Geography ofthe" Holy Land" recently seized the opportunity of the opening up of Palestine to paya visit to the geographical divinity of hisfaith. Asked soon after his arrival what hethought of the Holy Land of his religiousdreams, he replied sadly, "Well, Sir, twodays in this place has made me an infidell"For Palestine is about as unholy a land ascan be found anywhere on earth. This pilgrim's geographical idol was shattered andhe had nothing better to put in its place.Neither can Scripture be taken as anauthority on genealogies-as a kind of

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BLAKE ON THE LORD'S PRAYERDebrett of ancient days. I t is particularlythis claim on which the Jews insist, andif they are robbed of this legend-which byno possible ingenuity can be upheld-alltheir much proclaimed "rights" to anyland, or any posi tion, vanish. People whoreally possess rights do not ask for themthey take them. If they are wise they usethem wisely. Those who grant "rights"to illegitimate claimants to them, are guiltyof something like theft, since they are givmgaway something which is not theirs to giveto those to whom it does not belong.

Finally, the Scriptures are in no sense tobe regarded as an authority on materialScience. I t was the assumption of thiserroneous belief which led to the persecutionby the Church of men like Galileo andGiordano Bruno, and limited by centuriesthe acquisition of knowledge in one of itsaspects. The dogmas of the Church con-tain all the truths in closed caskets andthose who have the key are able to readthem. But the priests of the Church with

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IDOL WORSHIPthe help of the Jews have thrown away thekey and materialised all the dogmas, andin so doing have effectually crucified theSaviour.

In spelling out certain series of facts ofNature, Darwin and the evolutionists ofold days, together with the readers of theScripture of the rocks, have done much tobreak down this idol. The trouble withthem is that their vision is limited to whattheir five senses can show them, and theworkings of the invisible powers behindevolution are to them a closed book. Thusit has come about that their work, admir-able as it is from one point of view, hashad the result of setting up another ido l " Evolution " - in the place of the onewhich they have destroyed.

In point of fact, if we could only seeit, there is vastly more idolatry amongChristians, ] ews and intellectuals thanthere is among the so-called heathen.The futility of teaching as "history" theOld Testament legends to so-called

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BLAKE ON THE LORD'S PRAYERheathens is illustrated by a story relatedin a recent number of a missionary magazinedealing with the South Sea Islands. Anative named Tulang had suffered muchfrom malaria and the missionaries explainedto him that malaria was caused by mos-quitos. Tulang, who

clarke, j.h.-william blake on the lords prayer 1927

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