The Savoy . simplicity, of the simple world in which Christtaught and lived, and its lawlessness is the lawlessness of Him who beingall virtue acted from impulse, and not from rules, And his seventy disciples sentAgainst religion and government. The historical Christ was indeed no more than the supreme symbol of theartistic imagination, in which, with every passion wrought to perfect beauty byart and poetry, we shall live, when the body has passed away for the last time ;but before that hour man must labour through many lives and many are admitted into heaven, not because they have
The Savoy . simplicity, of the simple world in which Christtaught and lived, and its lawlessness is the lawlessness of Him who beingall virtue acted from impulse, and not from rules, And his seventy disciples sentAgainst religion and government. The historical Christ was indeed no more than the supreme symbol of theartistic imagination, in which, with every passion wrought to perfect beauty byart and poetry, we shall live, when the body has passed away for the last time ;but before that hour man must labour through many lives and many are admitted into heaven, not because they have curbed and governed theirpassions, but because they have cultivated their understandings. The treasuresof heaven are not negations of passion, but realities of intellect, from which thepassions emanate, uncurbed in their eternal glory. The fool shall not enterinto heaven, let him be ever so holy. Holiness is not the price of enteringinto heaven. Those who are cast out are all those who, having no passions of. BLAKES ILLUSTRATIONS TO THE DIVINE COMEDY 37 their own, because no intellect, have spent their lives in curbing and governingother peoples by the various arts of poverty and cruelty of all kinds. Themodern Church crucifies Christ with the head downwards. Woe, woe, woe toyou hypocrites. After a time man has to return to the dark valley whencehe came and begin his labours anew, but before that return he dwells in the free-dom of imagination, in the peace of the divine image, the divine vision, inthe peace that passes understanding, and is the peace of art. I have been verynear the gates of death, Blake wrote in his last letter, and have returned veryweak and an old man, feeble and tottering, but not in spirit and life, not in thereal man, the imagination, which liveth for ever. In that I grow stronger andstronger as this foolish body decays . . Flaxman is gone and we must all soonfollow, everyone to his eternal home, leaving the delusions of goddess Natureand her laws, to ge
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