Vision & vesture; a study of William Blake in modern thought

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Vision & vesture; a study of William Blak

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VISION AND VESTURE

" The Widening Vision is Imperious."

The Spanish Gypsy

VISION & VESTURE

A STUDY OF WILLIAM BLAKE
IN MODERN THOUGHT

BY

CHARLES GARDNER

Author of ** The Inner Life of George Eliot "

LONDON, PARIS & TORONTO
J. M. DENT (f SONS LIMITED
NEW YORK : E. P. DUTTON y CO.

MCMXVI

< \'> ^

Vf./J,f IJ -f

TO MY FRIEND

OSBERT BURDETT

WHOSE DIVINE COMEDY

" THE SILENT HEAVENS "

IS A SIGNIFICANT POSTSCRIPT TO

ELAKE's " MARRIAGE OF HEAVEN AND HELL '

PREFACE

This book was written for the most part before the

war. Mindful how the war has affected the mental

outlook of us all, I turned anxiously to its pages

to see whether I might not feel obhged to re-write

some of the chapters. But I found nothing I wanted

to alter: the only difference the war made was to

defer the publication for a few months, and these

have enabled me to stand far enough from my work

to view it objectively. I see, again, that its sub-title

suggests many volumes; for viewed quantitively

there was no reason why there should not be ten,

fifteen, twenty volumes, and my imagination

fainted at such a dreary prospect. But my instinct

leads all the other way; and when I asked myself

the question, how short my work might be, the

small volume was the only answer.

Knowing that one's instincts are to be trusted,

that is sufficient apology for my brevity, but to

those who feel happier when a recognised authority

can be quoted I will add, that August Strindberg

has shown how much can be said in a small volume.

Strindberg's self-revelation is not only complete

but one can never forget it. Hardly can one say as

much for Rousseau. When one lays down the bulky

vii

viii VISION AND VESTURE

volume of his Confessions one has a vivid remem-
brance of lurid passages, and a distressing con-
sciousness that much of what one has read has
slipped away. I might point to a greater than
Strindberg, for are we not all coming to think that
the greatest book of the eighteenth century was
also one of its smallest — Blake's Marriage of Heaven
and Hell ?

In deahng with modern thought I have preferred
not to treat it in the lump. By tracing thoughts
back to the thinkers the heavy lump dissolves into
the fine essence of men's minds, and gathers colour
and spirit from the individual thinker. And, there-
fore, I have dealt with persons — Goethe, Schopen-
hauer, Nietzsche, Shaw, Yeats. The one difficulty
has been that of selection, so many names have
started to mind. Here, too, I have followed my
instinct, alighting on just those men and women
who appeared to me to supply the necessary link
in the chain of modern thought. Some may think
that place might have been given to Browning,
Tennyson, Morris, Maeterlinck. I must say that
I do not think that they would have served my
purpose. The only possible regret I might have is
that I did not give a chapter to Samuel Butler; but
even of this I will not repent, for I judged deliber-
ately at the time that Butler hved again in Shaw,
and in treating Shaw with some fulness Butler's
value was not really overlooked.

PREFACE ix

Some six years ago I undertook to lecture on
Blake in South Kensington. To equip myself I
hastened to the British Museum to read through
the Blake Hterature. It was a far greater under-
taking than I had imagined, but I persevered and
read about forty volumes. From this strenuous
reading I discovered among other things, that most
of those who have written on Blake have been men
of letters approaching their subject from the literary
point of view. While recognising the importance of
their work, I think there is another side which is of
exactly equal importance. Blake refers so often in
his prophetic books to Wesley and Whitefield as to
make it obvious that they entered into his mental
life there to stay. Following up this hint, and hap-
pening at the time to be lecturing on eighteenth
century evangehcalism, I saw suddenly that there
were remarkable lines of convergence and divergence
between Blake and his religious contemporaries,
and that these points seized would prove valuable
and illuminating. That is my sufficient reason for
bringing Wesley and Whitefield forward to elucidate
Blake, all the more as they are almost always
ignored by men who hold a merely literary creed.
At the same time it accentuates the rehgious side of
Blake's nature, and that is of immense importance
to the present generation. To pounce on Blake's
poems and pictures, and to see in these only the
works of a great creative artist is to miss half his

X VISION AND VESTURE

value. For Blake's glory and Blake's significance
to our age is just this, that religion and art were
passionately fused in his own soul, and it is only by
doing full justice to both, and by presenting him
and his message whole and undivided that one can
hope to write worthily of a genius at once the most
creative and the most religious produced by the
western world.

Charles Gardner.

North End, Hampstead,
February 1916.

CONTENTS

PART I

CHAP.

I. Fundamentals ....
II. Imagination

III. Visionary Mysticism

IV. Nature ......

V. The Bright Sculptures of Los' Halls
VI. Sex and Holiness ....
VII. The Everlasting Gospel
VIII. Election and Predestination
IX. Blake's Symbolism ....

X. Blake's Art

XI. God and Man ....

pagb
I

9
i6

22
26

31

37
42
46

53
60

PART II

XII. Goethe, Schopenhauer, Nietzsche,[^Strindberg

XIII. Some Victorians

XIV. Bernard Shaw
XV. W. B. Yeats ....

XVI. Modern Religious Movements
XVII. The Saints of the Future

Index .....

106
122

143
156
166

183
317

XI

VISION AND VESTURE
PART I

CHAPTER I

FUNDAMENTALS

William Blake's message is slowly remaking the
world, says one of our modem writers who always
knows what the best minds are thinking, and he
adds: "No one can think, and escape Nietzsche;
but Nietzsche has come after Blake, and will pass
before Blake passes."

WiUiam Blake's was a voice crpng in the wilder-
ness of the eighteenth century. Arthur S3mions'
is one of a chorus that is shouting in the renascence
of the twentieth. For it is being acknowledged on all
sides that Blake has uttered the word we needed,
and that he has cast a sufficient Hght for genera-
tions yet to come. Profound as has been the influ-
ence of Goethe, Schopenhauer and Nietzsche, they
but carry us to the threshold of Blake. Blake must
draw us into his temple if we would have the
" linked eye and mind " to understand our age.

To comprehend Blake, it is necessary to go to his
fundamental axioms. These he has stated in a

A

2 VISION AND VESTURE

little book, now in the British Museum, in a way
that /defines his position sharply and enables one
to relate him to the teachers of the ages. The book
being very short can be quoted entire.

THE ARGUMENT

Man has no notion of moral fitness but from
Education. Naturally he is only a natural organ
subject to sense.

I

Man's perceptions are not bounded by organs of
perception, he perceives more than sense (though
ever so acute) can discover.

II

Reason or the ratio of all we have already known,
is not the same that it shall be when we know more.

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.

Man's desires are limited by his perceptions, none
can desire what he has not perceived.

FUNDAMENTALS 3

VI

The desires and perceptions of man untaught by
anything but organs of sense, must be limited to
objects of sense.

THEREFORE

God becomes as we are, that we may be as He is.

Man cannot naturally Perceive but through his
natural or bodily organs.

II

Man by his reasoning power can only compare
and judge of what he has already perceived.

Here in a few words Blake sweeps away Natural
religion, Rationalism, Deism, and all reHgions with
an ethical basis. Like the greatest religious teachers
he places regeneration as the first essential in order
to spiritual perception and understanding. There
is a unique element in Blake's teaching of regenera-
tion which I will consider in the second chapter;
here I want to compare the main features of his
doctrine with that of his predecessors.

The finest statement of regeneration is in the third
chapter of the Gospel which bears S. John's name.
Evidently the author has grouped together all he
knows about the new birth, from his own experi-

4 VISION AND VESTURE

ence, from the teaching of Christ, from Philo, and
Alexandrian Platonism.

" Except a man be born again, he cannot see the
Kingdom of God."

" That which is bom of the flesh is flesh, and that
which is bom of the Spirit is spirit." And he says
in effect, If a man would go to heaven, he must
first be born from heaven.

" No man hath ascended up to heaven, but He
that came down from heaven, even the Son of Man
which is in heaven."

S. Paul is equally emphatic. In his First Epistle
to the Corinthians, Chapter i., he writes:

" What man knoweth the things of a man, save
the spirit of man which is in him? Even so the
things of God knoweth no man, but the Spirit of
God."

" The Natural man receiveth not the things of the
Spirit of God, for they are fooHshness unto him:
neither can he know them, because they are spiritu-
ally discerned."

" He that is spiritual discemeth aH things."

In these great statements we get the gist of all
that has been said of the necessity of regeneration,
not only in Christendom, but also in India and
Egypt. Catholicism has identified the new birth
with Baptism, and so has made Baptism necessary
to salvation. Protestantism has dissociated it from
Baptism and identified it with conversion, thus

FUNDAMENTALS 5

making conversion necessary to salvation. Radically
there are two ways of regarding regeneration which
I will name the apocalyptic and catastrophic. The
catastrophic is best represented by Calvin. With
him regeneration was a sudden new creation from
without of a heart which was altogether depraved.
This has been the teaching of Samuel Rutherford
and the presbyterians, John Wesley and the
Wesleyans, Whitefield (Blake thought highly of his
two contemporaries, John Wesley and George
Whitefield), the Plymouth Brethren, and the bap-
tists, who were most consistent in their inter-
pretation of Calvin, because they waited till a man
was fully assured of his new birth and therefore of
his election, before he made an open confession of
it in Baptism. From such a view of regeneration
many evils resulted. The converted man narrowed
down his sjmapathies to those only who had the same
lively experience as himself. He was apt to be con-
temptuous of the unconverted, since he was sure no
good thing dwelt in him; and what was far worse,
he regarded even his own children as little reprobates
till they showed signs of God's grace.

The catastrophic view has also obtained widely
in the Anglican, Greek, and Roman Churches. Here
regeneration has been regarded as the miraculous gift
of Holy Baptism. The system has not worked so
badly as in protestantism, as it has taught Church
people to regard their baptised children as children

6 VISION AND VESTURE

of God. They have been able to include more in
their sympathies than the Calvinists, though they
have looked askance at the quakers; and the
greatest of the Church's teachers — St. Augustine —
said deplorable things about unbaptised infants.

The apocalyptic view of regeneration regards the
new life as a renewed creation. Instead of a sudden
miraculous new creation from without it recognises
a gradual unveiling of what is within. This has been
the teaching of all mystics whether inside or out-
side of the Catholic Church. It is certainly the
teaching of the supreme mystic who wrote the
fourth Gospel, since before speaking of the new
birth, he recognised that there was a " Ught that
lighteth every man that cometh into the world."
S. Paul probably held the same, though he has more
frequently been understood to hold to the catas-
trophic. S. Polycarp, S. Ignatius, Origen, S. Clement
of Alexandria, Justin Mart}^: follow S. John; so do
catholic mystics hke Tauler, Ruysbroeck, S. Teresa
on to Rosimini; and protestant mystics like
Tersteegen, Jacob Boehme, William Law, Jane
Lead. The whole truth is that regeneration is the
unveiling of what is within by the action of that
which is without, but such a view can only be held
by one who beUeves that God is both immanent
and transcendent.

William Blake is emphatic. His sense-bound
man (S. Paul's natural man) perceives only the

FUNDAMENTALS 7

things of the senses. But most men and all children
perceive at times something more than the senses
can discover. Man can desire only what he has per-
ceived, but his desires go beyond what the senses
can supply. And that perception over and above
the senses is a spiritual perception. It is the spiritual
perception of the real spiritual man which is un-
veiled in regeneration and brought to sovereign
control after prolonged mental fight. Thus the
spiritual man who discerneth all things can discern
the hidden man even in evil men — the soul of good
in things evil — and the command to love one's
enemies as well as one's friends becomes at least a
possibility, and in the fully grown spiritual man an
achievement. Above all it gives the right attitude
towards children. Here Blake's prime teacher —
Swedenborg — erred. He said that a child is born in
a natural degree. Blake who had the heart of a child
knew that the veil that hides the Real Man was
very thin and transparent in children; he knew
that a man's one chance of entering the kingdom of
heaven was by becoming like a little child ; he knew
when his own heart was troubled that the voices and
laughing of children could set it at rest.

When the voices of children are heard on the green.

And laughing is heard on the hill.
My heart is at rest within my breast.

And everything else is still.

For the Holy Child in the manger reveals our
God and Baby's smile is His smile.

8 VISION AND VESTURE

Sweet Babe, in thy face
Holy image I can trace;
Sweet babe, once like thee
Thy Maker lay, and wept for me.

Wept for me, for thee, for all,
When He was an infant small.
Thou His image ever see.
Heavenly face that smiles on thee!

Smiles on thee, on me, on all,
Who became an infant small;
Infant smiles are His own smiles;
Heaven and earth to peace beguiles.

Thus our childlike Blake in his teaching of re-
generation follows confidently the best masters of
the past; and he has added to them just one thing
that is making all the difference to the modern world,
but I must leave the unique element in his teaching
to another chapter.

IMAGINATION 9

CHAPTER II

IMAGINATION

The antithesis of art and religion did not exist for
the great Hebrew prophets. The notion that they
had a passion for righteousness and none for the
beautiful is untrue to facts. It probably arose
because the Jews painted no pictures and modelled
no statues. The reason was obvious. The second
commandment forbade anything of the kind, and so
the Hebrew was obliged to find another outlet for his
aesthetic craving. And he found it. Hebrew litera-
ture, Hebrew music, and Hebrew poetry have always
been her glory. Even to this day the German appears
to need an infusion of Jewish blood before he can
bring his music to perfection. No nation has ex-
celled in all the arts. It is much to master two; to
master more than two seems to exceed the bounds of
poetic justice. The Hebrew genius had a passion for
morality, and this was inseparable from its per-
ception of the beautiful. Our nineteenth century
writers, with the notable exception of George EUot,
misread the Hebrew character. Had they listened
to Blake instead of patronising him they would have
known better. In the Marriage of Heaven and Hell,
Blake asked Isaiah: " Does a firm persuasion that

lo VISION AND VESTURE

a thing is so, make it so? " He replied: " All poets
believe that it does, and in ages of imagination this
firm persuasion removed mountains." . . . Then
Ezekiel said: " The philosophy of the East taught
the first principles of human perception. . . . We
of Israel taught that the Poetic Genius (as you now
call it) was the first principle and all the others
merely derivative, which was the cause of our
despising the Priests and Philosophers of other
countries, and prophesying that all Gods would at
last be proved to originate in ours and to be the
tributaries of the Poetic Genius."

Whence it happened that the finest utterances
of Isaiah, Ezekiel, and Jeremiah were reUgion and
art at their highest.

When religion becomes diluted it falls apart from
art, and the two go separate ways. Art becomes
soft and corrupt, religion hardens into laws and
moralities. In protestant countries there springs
up a curious attitude of religious people towards
art. Protestantism hates the world, the flesh,
and the Devil; art cannot prosper without them,
nor can it breathe comfortably until it has suc-
ceeded in marrying heaven and hell. Protestantism
produced a Wesley, a Whitefield and a Toplady
who wrote some good hymns, notably Rock of
Ages, and these men were orators; but in its
vehement zeal for saving " immortal souls," it
seemed impious and irrelevant to consider the

IMAGINATION n

beautiful at all, and the gay licence of the Italian
Renascence was still fresh in its memory. Pro-
testantism at its height produced fine preachers,
when waning, Pharisaism.

Blake was protestant of protestants in intention,
though his ultimate scheme was not unlike that of
Catholicism. For him, as for the Hebrew prophets,
the dualism of art and religion did not exist, because
he held the apocalyptic view of regeneration, and
that the hidden man unveiled in regeneration was
the poetic genius.

Here let me quote his principles entire.

There is no Natural Religion
The Voice of one crying in the Wilderness

THE argument

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

Principle First

That the Poetic Genius is the true Man, and that
the body or outward form of Man is derived from
the Poetic Genius. Likewise, that the forms of all
things are derived from their Genius, which by the
Ancients was called an Angel and Spirit and Demon.

12 VISION AND VESTURE

Principle Second

As all men are alike in outward form, so (and
with the same infinite variety) all are alike in the
Poetic Genius.

Principle Third

No man can think, write or speak from his heart,
but he must intend truth. Thus all sects of philo-
sophy are from the Poetic Genius adapted to the
weaknesses of every individual.

Principle Fourth

As none by travelling over known lands can find
out the unknown; so from already acquired know-
ledge Man could not acquire more; therefore an
universal Poetic Genius exists.

Principle Fifth

The reUgions of all Nations are derived from each
Nation's different reception of the Poetic Genius,
which is ever5nvhere called the Spirit of Prophecy.

Principle Sixth

The Jewish and Christian Testaments are an
original derivation from the Poetic Genius. This is
necessary from the confined nature of bodily
sensation.

IMAGINATION 13

Principle Seventh

As all men are alike (though infinitely various),
so all Religions, as all similars, have one source.
The True Man is the source, he being the Poetic
Genius.

The Poetic Genius has one supreme faculty —
imagination. Hence to be bom again, for Blake,
meant not only to pass from death into life with
S. John, to be a new creature with S. Paul, but to
be a man of imagination with Michael Angelo,
Raphael and Albert Diirer.

The comparison with S. Paul is illimiinating.
Christianity liberated S. Paul from Judaism which
had become a bondage. Massive spirits like Isaiah
and Ezekiel escaped the bondage, but for the multi-
tude there were the iron laws of the Decalogue and
the thunders and lightning of Sinai. Conduct was so
minutely organised that it lost all inspiration. The
opportunity for spontaneous action was given to
those alone who kept the whole law, that is, actually,
to none. The Pharisees confident that they were
righteous occasionally brought their choice offer-
ings, but generally they evaded their one oppor-
tunity of a fine deed by an ingenious feat of
casuistry. When the Christ looked back on a life
of obedience not to the Law but to the Will of God
working in Him, He brought His inspired oblation
— He gave Himself. The tmattainable ideal of the

14 VISION AND VESTURE

Law was some comfort to the Pharisees who thought
they had kept it, but to conscientious souls Uke
Saul a terrible bondage. When Paul exulted in being
bom again in Christ, he was inebriated with his new-
found liberty to follow the inspiration of the Spirit.
This liberty was felt deep down at the springs of
action, and he realised that he could do what the
inner or new man willed, because his soul had
seized hold of life. Blake, too, felt the dreadful
bondage of the laws and codes and moralities of his
time, and also he perceived that art had fallen to the
same dead level as religion. It was tasteful plagiar-
ism and not inspiration. One man alone dared
to be himself and to express fearlessly his vision.
His contemporaries saw nothing but " pictured
moralities " which amused: it took a twentieth
century to discover the true greatness of Hogarth.
Thus Blake's long travail and mental fight was for
the new birth and freedom of Ufe and religion,
philosophy and art, and he proclaimed that all
these were the concern of the Real Man when
fully awakened.

David, in his picture of the Baptism of Christ in
Bruges, expressed the whole s57mbol of the Christian
rehgion coming to consciousness in Christ. And he
was right. In the imfolding of the spiritual hfe of
Jesus of Nazareth there was a moment in the waters
of Jordan when he realised that He was the Christ;
and He created the Christian consciousness. When

IMAGINATION 15

S. Paul became a new creature he made conduct the
fair fruit of inspiration. When Blake travailed
mightily in pain to be deUvered he brought forth
the Real Man, which is our deepest modern con-
sciousness. He not only maintained liberty of
conduct, but he freed the imagination and thence
the mind. Now we are at once Christians and free-
thinkers, and we are determined to stand fast in our
liberty.

rt'-.

<^,

i6 VISION AND VESTURE

CHAPTER III

VISIONARY MYSTICISM

The Real Man has one all-powerful faculty of
imagination. Blake in realising his Real Man became
a spiritual-imaginative man. So far I have com-
pared him to the spiritual leaders, now it becomes'
necessary to elucidate his use of the imagina-
tion by comparing him to the men of genius who
wielded most mightily the magic power of imagina-
tion. Shakespeare will best serve the purpose.

Shakespeare's imagination runs over the whole
natural man and the whole natural world. He revels
in everything on which it rests, and proceeds to find
perfect expression for what he sees. He can under-
stand every kind of man but the saint, and every
aspect of nature but the mystical. For him this-
world of Spring, Summer, Autumn and Winter
with its medley of men and women is the real world,
and he invests it with astonishing beauty. But
Shakespeare's real world was not Blake's. Blake
regarded this world as a shadow of the real. He
says:

Rivers, Mountains, Cities, Villages,
All are Human, and when you enter into their Bosoms you walk
In Heavens and Earths, as in your own Bosom you bear your
Heaven

VISIONARY MYSTICISM 17

And Eoirth, and all you behold, tho' it appears Without, it is

Within
In your Imagination, of which this World of Mortality is but

a Shadow. •

When one realises how much one invests the
world with its properties from one's own imagina-
tion, it becomes not an insane question to ask
whether the world exists at all. It appears sub-
stantial, but its apparent substantiality which is so
hard to dissolve is really a proof of the absolute
substantiality of the inner world which can never
be shaken. This world appears everj^where to be
bounded by outline; yet as every artist knows, the
world has no outhne, and the seeming outline is a
sharp reflex of the City which hath foundations.
To seek rest in this volatile fluxual world, is to seek
foothold in the bottomless pit; to walk the streets
of the Celestial City is to plant one's feet on the
firm golden pavement that never permits them to
slip. Just as Shakespeare's imagination roves at
its sweet will over this world, Blake's imagination
roved over the real world. Shakespeare's most
beautiful passages have something of the inevitable
vagueness of the world that passes away; Blake's
most majestic figures and poems convey the sharpest
impression of the most definite vision of real things.
The supposed twilight of the mystics has no place in
Blake. In his world the sun strikes with his fiercest
light objects of awful and indissoluble reality, for

^Jerusalem, p. 71, lines 15-19.

1 8 VISION AND VESTURE

the " Infinite alone resides in Definite and Deter-
minate Identity,"

Blake's Imagination, then, while seeing the Real
World, far transcends the world of the senses, and
that will serve as a definition of his visionary
Mysticism.

The mystic has ever found an almost insurmount-
able difficulty in making clear to others what he has
seen. Simple language has simple words which stand
for direct impressions of the senses. The mystic
moves in the world beyond sense, and for that reason,
simple sense-words scarcely serve his purpose. It
is true that the mystic deals frequently with the
world of the senses for which he has a vocabulary
ready to hand, and that it is just those parts lOf
religion which overlap into the domain of the
phenomenal world that can be expressed in accurate
scientific language; — no one is simpler and more
child-like than Blake when his subject permits —
but the moment a mystic tries to explain what he
sees beyond nature he is forced to use S5mabols, and
they must be symbols with which his imagination
is perfectly familiar. The mind of Jesus Christ was
steeped in the apocalyptic Hterature of His country,
hence it was natural for Him to express His direct
vision of the truth by apocalyptic s5mibolism. When
S. Paul laboured to proclaim his vision he used not
only sjnnbols borrowed from the religion of Gamaliel
but everything that had soaked into his mind from

VISIONARY MYSTICISM 19

a Greek source while he was yet a boy at Tarsus.
Dante had his direct vision, and was fortunate in
living just at the time cathoHcism had become poetry
and could supply him with beautiful symbols.
Milton, by an amazing combination of puritanism
and classicism expressed his vision in majestic
s5mibols. Blake had stored his mind from many
sources. Swedenborg was his first teacher. He had
at his command all the sjnnbols of the Christian
religion; Paracelsus and Fludd came to him with
much else through Jacob Boehme; he penetrated to
some of the mysteries of ancient Egypt; Gothic
architecture and Florentine art kept a permanent
place in his mind; yet these were insufficient for
his manifold vision, and finally he was driven to
inventing a new symbolism.

In deahng with a mystic visionary a word of ex-
planation is necessary. Visionary has been a term of
reproach and is still of men who ought to know
better. Formerly to say that a woman was visionary
was to say she was hysterical, and a man that he was
mad. Yet the long succession of visionaries includes
the greatest names — Isaiah, Ezekiel, Daniel, Jesus
Christ, S. John, S. Paul, S. Catherine of Siena, S.
Teresa, Jacob Boehme, George Fox, Swedenborg —
and not one of these can be overlooked.

It may be remarked first that each one of these
visionaries expressed his vision in the terms of his
own theology, and that some of these theologies are

20 VISION AND VESTURE

very contradictory. From this it has been inferred
that if one believes in S. Teresa's visions one must
become a Catholic, or in Swedenborg's, a Sweden-
borgian, and therefore visions must be relegated
along with over-beliefs to a very subordinate posi-
tion, or dismissed altogether. But very Uttle thought
shows the shallowness of this procedure. The con-
stant difficulty of the visionary arises from his acute
consciousness that what he sees is unutterable, and
yet he cannot rest till he has found imaginative
utterance. Like S. Paul he is caught up into Paradise
and hears unspeakable words which it is not possible
for a man to utter. If he would utter his vision, it
must be through the s3Tnbols and images with which
his mind is most familiar. Again there is a further
difficulty connected with the actual faculty of seeing.
A visionary can see the things of the other world
only in so far as they clothe themselves with the
whole mental imagery of the seer. Thus the mystic
sees more directly (though not nakedly) than the
ordinary man, and he is compelled to find a further
symbolical vesture for his vision or remain dmnb.

Blake has spoken the sane word when he said
that vision depended on will. F6nelon said that
religion was a matter of will, and thus removed it
far away from feelings and experiences, and from
the excesses of quietism which he saw in his friend
Madame Guyon. Blake by insisting that vision was
dependent on will, saved it from the charlatanry of

VISIONARY MYSTICISM 21

his contemporary Cagliostro, and will steady us, if
we hear his voice, amid the extravagant super-
stitions of our own time.

The consideration of Blake's special symboUsm
must be left to a later chapter.

22 VISION AND VESTURE

CPIAPTER IV

NATURE

How did Blake with his mystic vision regard
Nature ? Ever3rwhere in his poetry one sees that he
is passionately ahve to her alluring beauty, and
how the name of each object lingers on his ear with
a loving cadence.

The barked oak, the long-limned beech, the chestnut-tree, the pine.
The pear-tree mild, the frowning walnut, the sharp crab, apple

sweet.
The rough bark opens, twittering peep forth little beaks and

wings.
The nightingale, the gold finch, robin, lark, linnet and thrush.^

But he also sees like S. Paul that the " whole
creation groaneth and travaileth in pain; " every-
where he sees cruelty, and his heart pities not only
the fly devoured by the spider, but also the spider
snapped up by the bird. He sees an inmiense differ-
ence in her animals. Nothing is more perplexing to
one's scheme of life and religion than a visit to
the Zoological Gardens. One is glad to deny with
Spinoza all final causes, and to believe that the
Almighty created the grotesques in a humorous
mood for His own sheer delight. Blake immediately
relates each animal to God or to man.

' The Four Zoas. Night II. 175-178.

NATURE 23

The pride of the peacock is the glory of God.

The lust of the goat is the bounty of God.

The wrath of the lion is the wisdom of God.

The roaring of lions, the howling of wolves, the raging of the

stormy sea, and the destructive sword are portions of

eternity too great for the eye of man.
The fox condemns the trap not himself.
The rat, the mouse, the fox, the rabbit watch the roots; the

lion, the tiger, the horse, the elephant watch the fruits.
The fox provides for himself, but God provides for the lion.
The tigers of wrath are wiser than the horses of instruction.
When thou seest an eagle, thou seest a portion of genius; lift

up thy head !

The nineteenth century was too much preoccupied
with the cruelties of Nature which appeared a
stumbling-block to faith. Read Tennyson on
Nature's red tooth and claw and then turn to a
chance passage in Blake's Four Zoas :

Why does the raven cry aloud and no eye pities her ?
Why faJl the sparrow and the robin in the foodless winter ?
Faint, shivering, they sit on leafless bush or frozen stone,
Wearied with seeking food across the snowy waste, the little
Heart cold, the little tongue consumed that oncein thoughtless joy
Gave songs of gratitude to waving cornfields round their nest.
Why howl the lion and the wolf ? Why do they roam abroad ?
Deluded by the summer's heat they sport in enormous love.
And cast their young out to the hungry winds and desert sands.

Why is the sheep given to the knife ? the lamb plays in the sun.
He starts: he hears the foot of Man! He says: Take thou my wool.
But spare my life : but he knows not that winter cometh fast.

The spider sits in his laboured net, eager, watching for the fly.
Presently comes a famished bird and takes away the spider.
His web is left all desolate that his little anxious heart
So careful wove and spread it out with sighs and weariness.'

' The Four Zoas. Night I. 387-402.

24 VISION AND VESTURE

It is clear that Blake was equally wide awake to
the apparent cruelties of Nature, but he regarded
her as a vegetable mirror of man's mixed condition.
And, therefore, he blamed neither Nature nor God,
but man, who but for his contracted vision would
see through her instead of his own reflection.

Blake was attracted by Wordsworth though he
considered him enmeshed by Nature. Wordsworth
tried to climb to love of man through Nature, but
he did not rise much above her.

The mystics had said: Know thyself, and the
knowledge of the microcosm would reveal all the
secrets of the macrocosm. But the only sure way
has been S. John's. Little children, love one another.
Love to another will give understanding of man, of
self, and of Nature. To seek this understanding
through Nature, like Wordsworth, is to risk being
ensnared by her witchery.

Now Blake, while feeling the soft, alluring grace of
Nature, saw through her. Nature binds man down
to the five senses. Vision ranges far beyond. True
vision sees Nature not separate but a part of man;
not without but within man. Nature is the mirror
of man's inner hfe. Hence Blake feels the ecstasy of
the Hindoo mystic and

looks out in tree and herb, and fish, and bird, and beast.
Collecting up the scattered portions of his immortal body
Into the elemental forms of everything that grows.
He tries the sullen north wind, riding on its angry furrows,
The sultry south when the sun rises, and the angry east

NATURE 25

When the sun sets and the clods harden and the cattle stand
Drooping, and the birds hide in their silent nests.
He stores his thoughts as in store houses in his memory.
He regulates the forms of all beneath and all above, and in the
gentle west reposes where the sun's heat dwells.

Blake rises to the sun, he touches the remotest
pole; he sorrows in birds, and howls in the wolf;
he moans in the cattle and the winds, in the cries
of birth and in the groans of death.

Wherever a grass grows
Or a leaf buds, the Eternal Man is seen, is heard, is felt.
And aU his sorrows, till he reassumes his ancient bliss.

So long as man is unspiritual, the horrors of his
contracted state will appear mirrored in Nature.
When man reassumes his ancient bliss. Nature will
become a sea of glass before the throne of God flash-
ing back a resplendent image of the eternal deUght
of heaven

26 VISION AND VESTURE

CHAPTER V

THE BRIGHT SCULPTURES OF LOS' HALLS

Blake's vision of the real world and its inhabitants
must not be confounded with modern Spiritualism.
Clear vision of reality demands much preparation
and self-consecration. Ezekiel's first vision of the
Glory of the Lord overwhelmed him, and threw him,
as it did Isaiah, Daniel and S. John, into the
humblest attitude with his face to the groimd.
The Spirit entering into him set him on his feet;
but he received the Divine charge to speak to the
children of Israel with great reluctance. He went in
bitterness and in the heat of his spirit. He needed
to learn thoroughly the lesson he half learned at the
first sight of the Glory of God. When the hand of
the Lord was upon him and led him into the plain by
the river Chebar, he again saw the Glory of the Lord
and utterly 3delded himself. His self-donation led
him to clear vision. It was so with Blake. In his
i earliest years he saw clearly. Then came twenty
years of cloudy vision which terminated with his
farewell to Felpham and return to London. All
through these twenty years he was learning the way
j of obedience and naked faith. The lesson learned,
L^he vision returned and never left him again.

Ezekiel's and Blake's process is the reverse of that

SCULPTURES OF LOS' HALLS 27

of modem spiritualism. Blake lifted himself on to
the spiritual plane, spiritualism seeks to draw
spiritual beings on to the earthly plane; Blake re-
quired faith and imagination, spiritualism demands
sight and contact; Blake saw with his inner eye,
spirituaUsm sees with the bodily; Blake's method
led to spirituality, spiritualism to materialisation;
Blake's vision renewed the bodily hfe ; spiritualism
deranges it; Blake began in terror and ended in
peace, spiritualism begins in terror and ends in
madness. In the supreme act of Christian worship
the heart is bidden to Uft itself up.

Lift up your hearts.

And the response comes immediately

We lift them up unto the Lord.

For we are not to bring Christ down to our level,
but to raise ourselves up to the heavenly places
where with angels and archangels and with all the
glorious company of heaven, we may laud and
glorify God's Holy Name.

Every visionary knows the terror of passing out of
space and time. This experience comes to many an
imaginative child. In the night season when the
child makes a vain attempt to awake, suddenly he
becomes conscious of slipping out of time, and the
present moment becomes charged with the horror
of fiternity. Opium can produce a like result, as we
know from De Quincey. Blake was clearly familiar

28 VISION AND VESTURE

with such an experience, and it helped him to con-
ceive many of his designs, notably his illustrations
to the words of Job in the Job series: " With
dreams upon my bed thou scarest me and affrightest
me with Visions." This is why many of Blake's
designs seem to beginners Uke nightmares.

Blake fought his way beyond the terror till he
beheld the bright sculptures of the Halls of Los.
Here he saw everything he willed to see. He
described Los's Halls in Jerusalem :

All things acted on Earth are seen in the bright Sculptures of
Los's Halls, and every Age renews its powers from these Works,
With every pathetic story possible to happen from Hate or
Wayward Love, and every sorrow and distress is carved here;
Every Affinity of Parents, Marriages and Friendships are here
In all these various combinations wrought with wondrous Art.
All that can happen to Man in his pilgrimage of seventy years.
Such is the Divine Written Law of Horeb and Sinai ;
And such the Holy Gospel of Mount Olivet and Calvary.^

Los's Halls are familiar to mystics of aU countries
and ages. Theosophists call Los's Sculptures the
Akashic Records. Nature's memory is stored in the
Mther of Space, and the Seer can behold the sculp-
tured records of the Past as veil after veil is Ufted.

Mr. W. B. Yeats very simply calls Los's Halls the
Great Memory, and he has said beautiful things
about it.

The important thing to remember is that " every
Age renews its powers from these Works." It is
because Blake constantly dwelt in the Halls of Los

'■ p. i6, lines 61-69.

SCULPTURES OF LOS' HALLS 29

he has renewed our age. The Celtic Mystics of to-day
— Yeats, A. E. and Synge — ^have learnt where to
find these Halls, and so have produced beautiful
and life-giving works.

Blake claimed that religion was renewed from the
Halls of Los equally with art and literature. Every
nation has had access there, and therefore " the
antiquities of every nation under heaven are no less
sacred than those of the Jews." Each nation has
interpreted and coloured what it has seen according
to its own genius. This is the religion of Jesus and
the Everlasting Gospel.

Blake's perception of the Everlasting Gospel
delivered him from all delusions and conceit of hold-
ing advanced views. He saw how one Church suc-
ceeded another, and he counted even twenty-seven
Churches. The members of the twenty-seventh
Church invariably pride themselves on being ad-
vanced and modern: in reality they have com-
pleted the circle and are about to enter the first
Church again and so become not merely old-
fashioned but out of date. It is difficult to jump out
of the revolving wheel of the religions, but it can
be done, and Blake by entering Los's Hall not only
escaped cheap modernism, but saw that any renewal
of religion, art or literature depended on those
setheric records in which no detail of the Past was
forgotten. The Catholic Church has always felt this
strongly and so insisted, sometimes with persecuting

30 VISION AND VESTURE

zeal, that the Faith was once delivered to the
Saints. It is a greater glory to preach the Ancient
Gospel than a new Gospel. At best the New is but
a re-interpretation of the Old.

We must not overlook the fact that there are
strange guests in the Halls of Los. Besides the
Imaginative Geniuses and inspired seers, the
magicians have also the right of entry. The Alchem-
ists and Rosicrucians, Paracelsus, and Eliphas Levi
have practised their incantations with the definite
purpose of beholding the Halls, and they succeeded
in giving to unseen essences an ephemeral appear-
ance which terrified the uninitiated. We are coming
again to believe that the Egyptian magicians did
verily by their Black Art call forth frogs, and
locusts and lice.

Since there are such diverse visitors to the Halls,
it is necessary to distinguish them. The magician
desires knowledge and power, the true mystic love
and service. The decline of true religion is the
magician's opportunity. Jacob Boehme, Sweden-
borg and Blake, all three, knew the truth of magic
and avoided it. They knew, like S. Paul, that one
might ■' understand all mysteries and all knowledge,"
and yet entirely miss one's way; so they chose to
follow after the more excellent way of love which
not only builds up, but brings with it, in order, such
understanding and knowledge as are necessary for
perfecting the spiritual man.

SEX AND HOLINESS 31

CHAPTER VI

SEX AND HOLINESS

Each event in Blake's life set him thinking furiously.
Even the most trivial episode partook of the signifi-
cance of eternity. Scholfield figures prominently in
Jerusalem, not because Blake was petty and could
not forget a personal injury, but because Scholfield
immediately became in Blake's mind a ssnubol, and
Blake never forgot a sjmibol.

Marriage was bound to colour Blake's mind
deeply. Mr. ElUs has given a profoundly interesting
picture of Blake's early married life, and he assures
us that Mary and Broken Love are thinly disguised
reminiscences of this time. It is my object not to
repeat the story, but to draw out certain very
important facts about Blake's temperament.

Blake had a fuU passionate nature, which made
vehement demands. Like us all he had his pre-
matrimonial notions which were quickly upset by
his matrimonial experiences. The final adjustments
were made, but not without a good deal of pain
on both sides. The vehement demands of Blake's
nature worked in two directions, and besides a
dif&cult matrimonial adjustment to effect, he was
forced to consider sex in all its ramifications, and

32 VISION AND VESTURE

finally to enunciate a doctrine of sex, which has
proved a great deliverance to the modem world,

Blake's great word is: " Whatsoever lives is
holy." A comparison of Blake's conception of holi-
ness with that of the old ascetics will make his word
clear.

The ascetic monk mortified his flesh and all
fleshly motions with the purpose of freeing the spirit.
If one overcomes a hon one gains a hon's strength,
and if one overcomes the flesh the strength of the
flesh passes into one's spirit. The modem world is
scornful of asceticism and probably needs such a
powerful spirit — a John the Baptist — ^to teach it
the old lessons. The genial Son of Man came eating
and drinking, but His way was prepared by the
strong ascetic in the wilderness; and even He who
was called a gluttonous man and a wine-bibber was
said to have fasted forty days in the wUdemess.
The ascetic principle is a specific principle for a
specific end. As a gardener will nip many buds for
the sake of one fine bloom, so the ascetic nipped
the tender flesh in order to develop a spirit intense
enough to call sinners to repentance. The highest
ascetic has no grudge against the Bridegroom.
" The friend of the bridegroom, which sttrndeth and
heareth him, rejoiceth greatly because of the bride-
groom's voice," and the Bridegroom testifies that
the ascetic is a child of wisdom. " Wisdom is
justified of all her children."

SEX AND HOLINESS 33

Unfortunately this lofty understanding was not
maintained, and the hermits and monks were not
content to go the way of John the Baptist, but they
came to think in their hearts that it was the only
way, and they bequeathed to us an unreasoning
horror of sex. We are the victims of their fanaticism.
Good men and women torment themselves and
think themselves monsters because they are vital
enough to have strong sexual motions: profligate
men and women, who cannot think for themselves,
tacitly accept the monkish ideal as true, and in
their determination to ignore it bring utter confusion
into their moral conceptions.

We have supposed that the ascetics succeeded
in restraining desire. Blake wrote: " Those who
restrain desire do so because theirs is weak enough
to be restrained." This cannot have been the case
with the majority. In the night season when the
inhibitory powers are asleep amorous images are
apt to become rampant. Blake, remembering how
he suffered when his desires were restrained, wrote
in The Visions of the Daughters of Albion :

The youth shut up from
The lustful joy shall forget to generate and create an amorous

image
In the shadows of his curtains and in the folds of his silent pillow.
Are not these the places of religion, the rewards of continence.
The self-enjoyings of self-denial? Why dost thou seek religion?
Is it because acts are not lovely, that thou seekest solitude.
When the horrible darkness is impressed with reflections of

desire ?

c

34 VISION AND VESTURE

That is the average experience of the average man
who restrains desire. But what are we to say of the
Saints? When we remember the erotic language in
which many constantly expressed their vision of
divine things, can we beheve that they had crucified
the flesh as thoroughly as they imagined? It would
be truer to say that while they aimed at holiness by
the crucifixion of part of their nature, they actually
transmuted passion into higher energy.

Blake's aim was clear. He would crucify no part
of his nature but bring all the parts into order. The
holy man is at unity with himself. Therefore he could
not regard sex feeling either with horror or repug-
nance. Sex is simply Energy of Life. Just as
Nature is not without uian, but within, so "Man
has no body distinct from his Soul, for that called
Body is a portion of Soul discerned by the five
Senses, the chief inlets of Soul in this age." Enefgy
which " is the only life and is from the Body " is
the Energy of the Soul itself and this " Energy is
Eternal Delight."

Thus the sex power of the individual is his motor
power. To kiU sex — ^were it possible — ^is to rob the
engine of its steam.

This point of view at once places the harlot in
a new light. She is a frail vessel with immense
energies, and therefore far nearer the Kingdom of
Heaven than the religious pharisee. Blake was
attracted by Mary Magdalene and he painted her

SEX AND HOLINESS 35

in ecstasy. Mary Magdalene, the seven-devilled
harlot repentant at the feet of Christ had experi-
enced the whole gamut of vital ecstasy from s^x to
religion and thereby her name became to Blake a
symbol of the progress of a living soul. Passion is
never Avithout light as it contains much imagination.
Mary the harlot had a lurid Hght on the mysteries
of life, Mary repentant had a chequered light on
the mysteries of the Kingdom, Mary the Saint had
a white hght by which she divined the rnysteries
of God and her soul, of man and the universe.

I speak of the genuine harlot. We have come to
understand now that many a harlot is driven on to
the streets, not by the strength of her energies, but
by the iniquity of our social system. Nor is reUgion
without blame. So long as religious people mis-
understand the sex problem and remain wilfully
ignorant of it, they will be helping to swell the
number of harlots. Blake's daring paradox still
remains terribly true: " Brothels are built with
bricks of ReHgion."

Sex passion when it sweeps in with irresistible
force has its rhythm, its beauty and its ecstasy. It
transfigures all it touches, and beautifies the human
body. For it nothing connected with the body is
common or unclean. Raised to its highest power it
sees in the human form a direct revelation of the
divine; and when trusted leads a man as it led
Michael Angelo to the Fountain source of Beauty

36 VISION AND VESTURE

whence all forms are but partial manifestations.
Here it is inseparable from religion. The Supreme
self-surrender of the passionate soul to its Beloved
is a drama of that other surrender of the soul to
God by which it finds itself and enters on its true
reUgious life.

Blake thus would not eliminate passion, but trans-
mute it. Just as spirit transmutes pain to joyous
energy, so it transmutes passion to finest beauty.
It is only when the Real Man has passion as
driving force that his genius becomes creative, and
he grows wings strong enough to soar over the
Aonian Mount.

THE EVERLASTING GOSPEL 37

CHAPTER VII

THE EVERLASTING GOSPEL

Blake's large, unsuspicious nature was most trustful
of his fellow-men, and it laid him open to rude
shocks and sudden resentments. How hopeful and
glad he was at the beginning of Hayley's patronage
at Felpham! And how hopelessly exasperating
Hayley turned out to be after a few weeks !

When H y finds out what you cannot do,

That is the very thing he will set you to do.
If you break not your back 'tis not his fault,
But pecks of poison are not pecks of salt.

Again:

Thy friendship oft has made my heart to ache:
Do be my enemy for friendship's sake.

But Blake's fiercest resentment was against Cromek:

A petty, sneaking knave I knew. . . .
Oh, Mr. Cromek, how d'you do ?

No man appreciates being called gentle or harm-
less, and Hayley's gentle visionary Blake was
naturally aroused to wrath. Blake, conscious of
great powers of anger and resentment, cast about
to see whether those were not essential quaUties of a
great man.

Another mental process is discernible in Blake

38 VISION AND VESTURE

while at Felpham. From the time Mr. Matthews
advised him to polish his verses on to Mr. Hayley's
assimiption of the ofifice of spiritual director, Blake
was much exercised in his mind as to whether he
should order himself lowly and reverently to his
" betters " or whether he should trust himself.

One remembers how terribly S. Teresa suffered at
the hands of her spiritual advisers who did not
understand her. She, at least, had the joy afterwards
of being assured that she was right by her friend
S. Peter of Alcantara. The sunny soul of S. Francis
of Assisi became fearfully clouded when he started
preaching corpse-like obedience to authority. Sim-
shine returned only when S. Clare brought him back
to himself.

Blake's was a simple, childlike soul, and it was
difficult enough for him to discern the path of true
humiHty. Humility appears to dictate submission.
Yet Blake knew well that to submit was to put an
extinguisher on his genius, and he finally cut his
way through the maze by trusting himself. He
seems henceforth to have confounded humility with
sneaking submission. Blake's self-confidence not
only incurred the charge of egotism, but it soon
made him a law-breaker. Could self-will be made
to coincide with God's will? One may well doubt
whether all the modern apostles of egoism do God's
will; but there is no doubt about Blake. The self
he trusted was the inner Real Man whose language

THE EVERLASTING GOSPEL 39

is ever: Sacrifice and offering thou didst not desire:
mine ears hast thou opened : burnt offering and sin
offering hast thou not required. Then said I, Lo, I
come: in the volume of the book it is written of me,
I deUght to do thy will, my God: yea, thy law is
within my heart ! *

The Will of the Real Man is the Will of God.
Obedience to this Will is disobedience to the laws.
Blake, finding these great principles working them-
selves out in his life, turned afresh to the Gospels,
and there he saw in the story of Christ's life th3
sublimest setting forth of his own deepest experi-
ence.

The immediate cause of writing The Everlasting
Gospel was resentment against Stothard. The joint
behaviour of Cromek and Stothard in the production
of The Canterbury Pilgrims infuriated Blake and he
turned to Jesus Christ to justify his anger.

Was Jesus gentle? Nay the wrath of the Lamb
was terrible. Was Jesus humble ?

This is the race that Jesus ran:
Humble to God, haughty to man

If thou humblest thyself thou humblest Me.
Thou also dwellest in eternity.
Thou art a man. God is no more.
Thy own humanity learn to adore;
For that is my spirit of life.

Humility is only doubt,

And does the sun and moon blot out.

■ Psalm xl. 6-8.

40 VISION AND VESTURE

Roofing over with thorns and stems
The buried soul and all its gems.

Was Jesus chaste ?

He from the adultress turned away
God's righteous law that lost its prey.

Was Jesus obedient ? He was crucified for
breaking the laws. Thus Jesus was not humble or
gentle, chaste or obedient. He was proud, wrathful,
gentle to unchastity, and disobedient.

But as Blake studied this strange life deeper and
deeper his spirit kindled. Jesus always forgave sins.
Every sin was forgiven except that of the man who
obstinately shut his eyes to the Hght. As Blake
read and pondered he arose above his excrementitious
resentments and gained the Christ level where he
could understand everything and forgive. Hence-
forth he knew:

Mutual forgiveness of each vice,
Such are the gates of Paradise.

And this is the Everlasting Gospel.

The Everlasting Gospel is as ancient as the Halls
of Los. Men receive it and by a deadly process harden
it into laws and moralities. Then nothing but the
defiance of the law-breaker can avail to renew the
old, old Gospel. Here and there one may be found,
but it is at the cost of all that he hath, if not of
life itself.

Blake gave a new reading of Christ's life. His

THE EVERLASTING GOSPEL 41

contemporaries, Wesley, Whitefield, Toplady and
Fletcher of Madeley, saw in the Ufe of Christ a
mechanical obedience to the law, and in His death a
substitutionary atonement for the sin of their soul.
Blake saw in His life a persistent disobedience to
the law, and in His death the penalty of the rebel's
obedience to the Will of God who by His agony and
bloody sweat, by His Cross and Passion advances
the Day of the Lord when the Kingdoms of this
world shall become the Kingdoms of God and of
His Anointed.

42 VISION AND VESTURE

CHAPTER VIII

ELECTION AND PREDESTINATION

When Blake succeeded in marrying Heaven and
Hell, he discovered in Hell a rich, unworked mine.
He at once proceeded to rescue passion from Hell's
clutches with fruitful results, and then seized such
reprobate words as excess, exuberance, impulse, and
found that they were excellent servants of passion.

The road of excess leads to the palace of Wisdom.

Exuberance is beauty.

Jesus was all virtue, and acted from impulse, not from rules.

These aphorisms first shock, and then are dis-
covered to be pearls of wisdom.

The business of life is to find out what the Real
Man in us really Hkes and wills, and to follow his
commands with unswerving loyalty. The first duty
of a parent and schoolmaster is to educate (lead out)
the Real Man. Samuel Butler in his masterly Way
of all Flesh wrote a biting satire on the way they
did it. No doubt schoolmasters are improving, yet
even now headmasters can be found who have a fine
capacity for suffocating the Real Man in their
pupils, and cramming their tender minds with
masses of irrelevant knowledge. The road of excess
is an experimental way of discovering the Real Man.
It is true what Blake says : " You never know what

ELECTION AND PREDESTINATION 43

is enough unless you know what is more than
enough "^and a strong soul that yields to all
temptations in turn soon knows what it Ukes and
what it wills. But there are obvious limitations to
this rule. We must not cast ourselves down from
the pinnacle of the temple to see whether God's
angels will bear us up. Here the written word of
wisdom must be our guide. The road of excess, if
it brings bruising or a general upheaval and not
maiming or death certainly leads to wisdom; and
while we are learning what we like, we shaU at the
same time rid our minds of many illusions and false
values. So we may readily admit that this road
is safe for elect souls, but how about the weak?
Many undeniably stumble and fall and never rise to
their feet again. " Let them, "says a pupil of Nietzsche,
" they are not wanted," yet Christianity has wanted
them and generally uses them to confound the wise.
Blake's doctrine brings the old problem of election
to view again, for in some form or other it must
always reappear. The elect soul prospers in hell,
and the reprobate turns heaven to hell. And why
do they fundamentally differ? Since the difference
does not depend on the will of man, then it must
ultimately depend on the will of God " Who worketh
all things after the counsel of His own will." And
so men may argue. But one must insist that life
is greater than logic, and though election cannot
be stated satisfactorily in terms of logic, it can be

44 VISION AND VESTURE

known in the higher synthesis of life. Jeremiah,
Jesus Christ, S. Paul, S. Augustine, Calvin, Blake,
all beheve in election. Yet how vastly different
their treatment ! Jeremiah is tender and firm, as he
writes of God the Potter, and Man the Clay. S. Paul
is harsh in the extreme in his Epistle to the Romans
and can quote with equanimity, " Jacob have I
loved, Esau have I hated; " yet he catches the
Spirit of Christ when he writes to the Corinthians:
" For ye see your calling, brethren, how that not
many wise men after t^^e flesh, not many mighty,
not many noble, are called: but God hath chosen
the foolish things of the world to confound the wise;
and God hath chosen the weak things of the world
to confound the things which are mighty; and base
things of the world, and things which are despised,
hath God chosen, yea and things which are not, to
bring to nought things that are ; that no flesh should
glory in His presence." Calvin is logicsil and grim.
Blake's great name has been seized by a narrow
coterie who fondly imagine they are elect. Blake's
doctrine was balanced in his own mind, while he
emphasised the value of excess, just because it was
a truth that had been overlooked. History teaches
a curious lesson of election. What contemporary
dreamt that Shakespeare, Joan of Arc, Hogarth,
Samuel Butler, Blake, was elect? And to whom
did it occur as Christ hung on the Cross that He
was God's Elect in whom He delighted?

ELECTION AND PREDESTINATION 45

It is true that the road of excess leads to the
palace of wisdom for it cuts away unrealities and
conventions, and what value may lie hidden in a
man it brings to the surface; but it also would lead
many to destruction, whom it is the special glory of
Christianity to save. S. Augustine came to wisdom
by the road of excess ; and so did Christ, but there was
a wide divergence in the ways their excesses led them.

Blake divined Christ's secret of growth when he
wrote that He acted from impulse. The man of
impulse is always a power and attraction. The
villain acts from impulse hke Milton's Satan, and
our imagination is rightly enthralled. The irritating
person is th6 one stretching and straining far beyond
his proper spiritual stature. He repels by his
unnatural and abortive attempts to be other than
himself, and therefore we love the impulsive villain
and hate the plaster saint. Christ's native impulses
led him to put aside His parents, to break the law
of the Sabbath, to drive the money-changers out of
the Temple, to denounce the Scribes and Pharisees
in white-heat anger, to defy authority, and rather
than submit to it to die. It was by trusting His
impulses that He grew in favour with God and man.
" Consider the lilies how they grow," He had said.
The supreme attraction of Jesus has lain in the fact
that He grew Hke the lilies of the field, and so His
personality was inevitably beautiful.

46 VISION AND VESTURE

CHAPTER IX

BLAKE'S SYMBOLISM

It is necessary now to return to Blake's s3niibolism.

Blake's symbolism had one great disadvantage,
that much of it was new. A s3nnbol is like wine, the
better for being old. The eighteenth century had
no fine old symbolism that had not been fully used.
The nineteenth century was more fortunate, and
Wagner seized the spoil of Scandinavian mythology
and expressed his vision not in party terms of
Schopenhauer and Roeckelian Sociahsm, but in
symbols of a m3rthology which was old enough to
have become of rich and universal significance.

Blake used the old Christian s3nmbols freely and
with great beauty, but his manifold vision and
spirit of prophecy demanded a larger vesture, and
he was compelled to create new mythic personaUties.
It is his elaborate new S3miboUsm for which we have
not a satisfactory key that makes him so difficult
to follow and his prophetic books so crude to the
taste,

Blake always paid a tribute to Milton's massive
power. His own mental build was massive, and we
must reckon him among the men of inunensg power
like Michael Angelo, Luther, Oliver Cromwell.

BLAKE'S SYMBOLISM 47

Power without art becomes destructive and icono-
clastic; united with art, it becomes creative not
only of worlds on a colossal scale, but also of little
flowers that grow at the foot of great mountains.
Milton revelled in his huge Angels and Devils, in
his abysses and immensities. These things were for
him the revelation of the Infinite. We find very
small things even to mites and microbes hkewise a
revelation of the Infinite. Blake loved equally with
Milton the Titanic figures, but he also came to insist
on the minute particulars and to feel that the enor-
mous and the minute are interchangeable manifesta-
tions of " the Eternal which is always present to the
wise." Urizen and Los, Luvah and Tharmas are
Miltonic figures and move on a Miltonic scale.

Blake uses the old ssmibols and sometimes pours
a fuller meaning into them. Thus Jesus is not only
God, Saviour, Redeemer, Wisdom, Power, High
Priest, Prophet, King, but also and pre-eminently
Imagination, and Imagination is all these. Water
is still the symbol of the new birth; and Bread and
Wine are the food of the Real Man. Blake makes
full use of the Tree of Knowledge and the Tree of
Life, though he much prefers the Tree of Life. Hell
is sometimes used to express the state of those who
have no imagination and are therefore dead in
trespasses and sins, but it also stands for excess,
feStuberance, impulse, vitality, energy, sex, passion,
and all these are taken over by the Real Man.

#

48 VISION AND VESTURE

S. Paul's famous pair, Law and Grace, received a
wider application. S. Paul thought of the Moral
Law which, unable to give life, increased the bondage
and condemnation of those who did not keep it.
Blake includes all that S. Paul meant, but he wanted
a symbol to express also the mental processes of the
rational man, his works from the making of the Law
of the Decalogue to " the Prisons which are built
with stones of Law," and the hard Philistine spirit
which despises the works of the Imagination;, and
for this he created a terrible figure and called him
Urizen. Thus Urizen is the false Jehovah. Urizen's
opposite is soon comprehended. The Real Man,
Imagination, Inspiration, these are the Eternal
things wherein hfe and salvation consist. They are
the sun in the spiritual heavens, the Sol which
easily becomes Los.

In fallen man, there is an immense amount of
feeling which is separated on the one side from
divine love which has mind, and on the other from
desire which always contains a measure of imagina-
tion. This unthinking, unimaginative love Blake
called by the feminine word Luvah. Luvah ever
tends to luU life into a deadly sleep. Just as Urizen
is false Jehovah, so Luvah is false Christ.

Tharmas is another feminine word (perhaps
derived from Tammuz, Ezek. viii. 14) to express
Nature in her contracted form. Nature is the
matrix, also the vegetable mirror of the natural

BLAKE'S SYMBOLISM 49

man bound by his five senses. Urthona is the regent
of dark fire. He is vital material energy struggling
for fuller life, and Uke the Holy Spirit seeks to bring
order out of chaos. Los has four sons, Rintrah,
Palamabron, Theotormon and Bromion. Many
other symbols occur, as Bowlahoola, the region of
digestion, Allamanda, the nerves of reason and
reproduction, Entuthon Benython, solid abstract,
Udan Adan, liquid abstract. Jfere I want to return
tq Blake^ primary four. Urizen, Luvah, Tharmas,
and Urthona represent states, and states are eternal.
Man may be in any state. If he is in the state of
Urizen, he is a rationalist, in the state Urthona he
is strugghng with dark, vital passions. Man's
redemption consists in being led by Los — ^imagina-
tion and inspiration — and so bringing the other
states into their proper place. There is no expulsion
required but regulation resulting in a man being at
unity with himself. One may hate a state, but never
the man that is in it. A clear vision of a man's state
renders it quite easy to forgive him even to seventy
times seven; and as to the state itself, there is
safety in having something on which to spend one's
righteous wrath.

Blake would offer little difficulty, if his symbols
stopped here, but he has complicated matters
enormously by introducing the names of innumer-
able places in the United Kingdom. Correspond-
ing to Urizen, Luvah, Tharmas, and Urthona he

so VISION AND VESTURE

has Verulam, London, York and Edinburgh,
also Battersea, Chelsea, London and Canterbury.
Blake's feeling for place was intense, and to find a
parallel one must go to the early Semitic peoples.
German research has made it clear that they had
highly organised, sensitive bodies, and undeveloped
intellects. These sensitive bodies were excessively
responsive to the unseen world, hence a Semite's
normal approach to it was by physical means rather
than intellectual. A place where an Israelite en-
countered a heavenly visitant became holy and
another Israelite who might chance to aUght on the
spot would become conscious that it was charged
with a divine Presence. Hence there were holy
places like Bethel and Penial, a holy movmtain like
Horeb, a holy city hke Jerusalem, a holy land like
Palestine. These names became symbols, and at the
same time Egypt, Babylon, PhUistia took on repre-
hensible significance.

If a place could become charged with the Divine,
this was much more so with a Tabernacle or a
Temple. The Holy of HoUes in the Tabernacle was
not safe and no one could enter it except the High
Priest " lest he die." The High Priest entered once
a year after due precautions. The usual method to
dissipate the Divine energy was by carefully regu-
lated vibrations and this was effected by an arrange-
ment of bells. For the same reason the Israelites
might not touch the Holy Mount " lest they die."

BLAKE'S SYMBOLISM 51

And Uzzah in his rash attempt to steady the Ark
died on the spot.

Gradually a change was effected. The intellect
was pushed forward at the expense of the body, and
by the time it had advanced sufficiently to produce
an Isaiah, the body had become comparatively dull.
Still even in Christ's time the Jews retained suffi-
cient bodily sensitiveness to make them hable to
possession. Since then we have pushed the intellect
to the extreme, and little has remained of the old
order except in the Sacraments of the Church, and
in the Consecration of Churches and burial grounds.

There are signs that we are discovering again the
lost power of our bodies. If we learn to approach
Reality not only by our intellects but also by our
subtihsed bodies then there may soon be an immense
advance in our spiritual consciousness.

Blake's strong feeling for place had every oppor-
tunity for development in his life. Both before and
after his marriage he was a great walker. The
rhythmic exercise of walking brought him, sensitive
as he was to all rhythm, into immediate perception
of the spirit of whatever place he might happen to
visit. England entered into his mental strife, and he
sought to find in Battersea and Chelsea, Highgate
and Hampstead, London and Canterbury, symbols
of man's states as simple to understand as the
symbols Egypt and Goshen, Babylon and Assj^a,
Judah and Jerusalem to the spiritual Israelite.

52 VISION AND VESTURE

The strange array of places in Jerusalem may at
first repel, but Blake was on the right road in restor-
ing a primitive instinct of place which, it is likely,
will be very fruitful in the near future.

But did those feet in ancient time
Walk upon England's mountains green,
And was the Holy Lamb of God
On England's pleasant pastures seen?

Bring me my Bow of burning gold —
Bring me my arrows of desire;
Bring me my spear; O clouds, unfold!
Bring me my Chariot of fire !

I will not cease from mental fight,
Nor shall my Sword sleep in ray hand.
Till we have built Jerusalem
In England's green and pleasant land.

BLAKE'S ART 53

CHAPTER X

blake's art

Blake's vision was manifold, and he was richly
endowed with a loVe for drawing, painting, poetry
and music. This opulence was embarrassing, but he
eventually found that drawing, painting and poetry
supplied the most effective vesture for his vision,
and the music fell into the background.

We have seen that religion and art were one in
Blake's soul, that the Real Man perceives spiritual
realities and works by imagination, and therefore
of necessity when Blake's Real Man came to express
himself, he used an art medium. That is Blake's
unique glory as a mystic. The Hebrew prophets
used prose and so transfigured it that it is almost
indistinguishable from poetry. The great Christian
mystics expressed themselves theologically; Blake's
contemporary, Wilham Law, had command of a
very fine prose; but Blake himself by an inherent
necessity uttered himself as an artist and thus not
only inwardly but also outwardly effected the union
of religion and art. This is sufficient to put Blake
among the Gods, but he has not escaped the fate of
the Gods. The human instinct which demands that
a man shall be a synthesis of all human perfections

54 VISION AND VESTURE

is a very old one. Religious orthodoxy in its attempts
to see in the Son of Man the representative man has
only succeeded in making Him unreal. Jesus cannot
be all-inclusive man ; it is the mystical Christ that,
like the white diamond, contains a thousand facets
each flashing the colour of some human perfection.
Blake is very far from being an embodiment of even
all our modern feelings and consciousness, and equally
far from being a tjrpe of that all-embracing culture
which admires everything without partiality. His
prime value was his definite vision, and that resulted
in his finest work and his fiercest resentments. His
resentments against Titian, Rubens, and Sir Joshua
Reynolds may in turn irritate us, and we shall need
to keep in mind his finest work and his everlasting
Gospel if we would forgive him.

S': Blake's art was rooted in his vision of the Real
World of which this world is the vegetable mirror.
All things pertaining to the Real World have the

/ clearest outline which is only reflected in Nature's
mirror. Since the function of Art is to pierce through
to the Real World, then it follows that the Artist

/cannot be too definite in his outhnes, and that good
drawing is the foundation of all great art.

Blake was bound to formiolate such a canon of
art and to apply it without compromise to the
Masters. Michael Angelo, Raphael, Albert Diirer
remain; Rembrandt, Rubens and Titian are swept
away. One is reminded of Tolstoi whose ultimate .

BLAKE'S ART 55

definition of art allowed no room for Shakespeare and
Beethoven among the Gods. Blake was wrathful
at Rembrandt's t^urred outline, and still more at
his treatment of the minute particulars in which
Christ generally figured like a brewer's drayman.
Rubens' art was merely the blurred apotheosis of the
fleshj and Blake was blind to the beauty of his fat
Venuses. None of the Venetians, not even Cor-
reggio and Titian, could draw. They attained to an
amazing harmony of colour — an over-elaboration
which amounted to a fault in Blake's eyes. Blake
would have raved in a modern art gallery. One can
imagine his fierce denunciation of Monet and Manet,
to say nothing of Gauguin and Van Gogh. Yet in
one matter Blake might have appreciated at least
the aims of the post-impressionists. He loved pure,
^^lshaded colour. Colour was the soul of his figures
and each elemental colour was a symbol — and so he
might have been beguiled into involuntary admira-
tion of the vivid pure colour effects of a Signac. It
is to the Pre-Rap^jaehtes and not to the Impres-
sionists we must look for a parallel with Blake's
aims. Like them he was reactionary, and for his
technique he looked to the past, and he found in
Michael Angelo all he, needed to express his pro-
phetic visions. His reed love was for the old
Florentines; yet a comparison with Michael Angelo
wiU bring out certain important differences. Both
loved working on a massive scale, and both created

56 VISION AND VESTURE

immense figures, and by the side of their immense
figures they loved to place lovely, slight, ethereal
beings. Both showed a prodigious creative force
and selected the same subject to exercise it — The
Creation of Adam. Both met in the supreme value
they set on outhne, and here they separated.

■Michael Angelo aimed at soHdity and depth, Blake
at dignity by long unbroken lines. Michael Angelo

I appeared to work in three dimensions, Blake in two.
Michael Angelo worked through a storm of passion

' excited by the human body till he beheld the Face
of God; Blake saw God from the beginning and man
the definite revelation of God. Michael Angelo
ended by transfiguring the flesh, Blake gazed at the
flesh till it became translucent and through it shone
the Eternal definite world of the Imagination.

Blake's fierce creative power showed itself again
and again, in the Ancient of Days, in the figures of
Job, Ezekiel, Caiaphas, Nebuchadnezzar. In his
picture of Nebuchadnezzar driven out into the
fields, with the look of horrible madness in his eyes
and mouth, one sees the inevitable chmax when
rationahsm has run its full course. For sheer loveli-
ness one must turn to such pictures as The River
of Life, Jacob's Ladder and The Nativity. Jacob's
Ladder is fine ,in conception and execution. The
upward progress of the human spirit is by a series of
spiral rounds, and it was a happy inspiration that
made Blake first conceive Jacob's Ladder as a

BLAKE'S ART 57

spiral. In this picture the drawing and pure colour-
ing are alike beautiful. The River of Life is almost
perfect, yet Blake had an ineradicable dislike of
technical perfection, and just when a picture was
nearing completion, he would wilfully mis-draw a leg,
or a foot or a forefinger and insist that the crooked
finger weis a road of genius. Rodin's word to Arthur
Symons — " He should have looked again " — ^is just.
Another look at the husband's leg and foot in the
River of Life would have made the picture an irre-
sistibly lovely masterpiece. The Nativity, which was
the design for Milton's Hymn for the Nativity, is
exquisite, and it is pure Blake. Blake saw all that
his predecessors saw in Christmas and something
more. The lovely figure of Nature lying in the snow
and gazing with clasped hands at the Mother and
Child is Nature rightly related to God, to Man, to
the Mother, to the Child. With pure colours that
Blake has learnt from Nature herself he paints a
little world in whose bosom is the mystery of the
Universe.

Blake did not found a school of art. His influence
can be traced in the early works of George Richmond,
Samuel Palmer, John Linnell and Edward Calvert
and there ends. Yet he was not merely the tail end
of the Florentines. He accomplished designs which
were unique and adequate presentments of his
unique vision; and as if that were not enough, he
commanded another medium of expression, and in

5 8 VISION AND VESTURE

the effort to convey his revolutionary message,
Hurst through the traditions even of blank verse Eind
made poetry a rhythmic vehicle of his highest
inspiration.

Swinburne has written so finely of Blake's Lyrics
' that I shall not presmne to add another word. I will
only insist on the fact that Blake's love for " crooked
roads " manifested itself from the beginning. His
aphorism in reply to Mr. Matthews when he sug-
gested that he should correct his poetical sketches
v' was prompt and final: " Improvement makes
. straight roads, but the crooked roads witho^t
: Improvement are roads of Genius." Blake's im-
patience of Titian's technical perfections and of the
small perfections of polished verse was like our
modern rebound from mere prettiness which has
made some of our young artists deny that art is
, necessarily concerned with the beautiful. Blank
I verse appeared to Blake slightly artificial. He was
I supremely sensitive to rhythm for he was a magician,
and rhythm is the evocative power in the magician's
^incantations, but he could not bear that the rh3^1mi
, should be broken by regular lines, yet an unbroken
' rhythm Hke a fast spinning wheel maddened his
brain, and he felt himself compelled to twitch at
the wheel from time to time in order to maintain
his mental equilibrium.

Blake naturally suggests a comparison with Waif
Whitman who though half a century later was yet

BLAKE'S ART 59

before his time. Mr. Yeats (father of the poet) and
Professor Dowden hailed the poet, but it was many
years before the claims of Lowell gave place to Walt
Whitman's. Walt Whitman sinned less than Blake.
In both was the pulsing spirit of life. The rhythm of
Walt Whitman's pulse was perfectly discernible in
his irregular lines. Blake's vision of hfe of which his
contemporaries had no inkling intoxicated his brain
and made his pulse beat fiercely irregular.

Thus Blake in his designs looked to the past, and
in his poetry to the future. Blank verse had become
too strait for him. His widening vision imperiously
demanded a wider medium, and his prophetic books
are a challenge to us either to deny his pretentious
claims or tohailTiim as the apostle of a new order of
poetry.

6o VISION AND VESTURE

CHAPTER XI

GOD AND MAN

Blake in all his Prophecies pressed vehemently
towards the realisation of the great conception
which possessed his mind — the conception of the
divine humanity. His conception of God is in terms
of Man. He has a horror of a God who is abstract,
vague, or indefinite, for though God is infinite and
all-present, yet He is terrible to the imagination
unless he has outline. Man is God's outline. In the
Everlasting Gospel ^ Blake hurls his word hke a pro-
jectile: " Thou art a man, God is no more," and
therefore, once for all, let it be understood that God
is known only through man; man is the continuous
revelation of God. Jesus said to Thomas: If ye had
known me, ye should have known my Father also.^
Blake heartily believed that word, and applied it
more universally than theologians had hitherto
dared. In every man there lies hidden the Real
Man which is God's Image. Therefore as every man
discovers his Real Man, he discovers God. The Real
Man in every man is one in essence with the Keal
Man in all men, but he differs in identity, and there-
fore as each man discovers his real self, he unveils

• The Everlasting Gospel, 71. ' John xiv. 7.

GOD AND MAN 6i

another letter in God's Name and ensures to
humanity the progressive revelation of God.

In the natural or unregenerate man the Real
Man lies bound hand and foot, and can scarcely
make his voice heard from his prison house. Blake,
who instinctively worked by symbols, turned to
the s3mibolist Evangelist and took over j Laza rus
enswathed with grave-clothes as the symbol of the
natural man. Throughout The Four Zoas and Jeru-
salem Blake is haunted by the language of S. John,
and weaves in its every sentence and word as he
describes the new birth and final judgment of man
in his passage from death into Ufe. But Blake never
confines himself long to one image, and he passes
with lightning speed from Lazarus and his chamel
house, and sees fallen man as Albion fixed to a rock.
Around him beat the storms and snows. " Howling
winds cover him, roaring seas dash furious against
him, in the deep darkness broad lightnings glare,
long thunders roll." ^ And so Albion remains, hard,
cold, contracted, opaque, isolated, miserable, asleep,
till the Divine voice pierces to the hidden man and
awakens him to eternal life.

Perfect man is a creature of four-fold vision:
fallen his vision is quenched. Whereas he was able
to explore the inner world of reality with inward
vision, he finds that what is within is turned ruth-
lessly without. The heavens appear above, the earth

• Jerusalem, 94, 1-4.

62 VISION AND VESTURE

around, and his body becomes the object of his five
senses. He has now only the five senses to inform and
instruct him. Therefore if he is driven to make a
reUgion it is a natural rehgion, if a philosophy it is
the sensual philosophy of Locke. Himself contracted,
he is compelled to live in a contracted world. Yet
he cannot rest satisfied, for deep within is the Real
Man bound and almost inarticulate, and he has the
crowning sorrow of vaguely remembering happier
things. Mercifully there is a limit to this contraction,
otherwise the real man would sink into eternal
death never to rise again. Man's contracted state is
called by Blake Adam. Blake en^Efses the great
statements made by S. P&,ul concerning Adam, in the
Epistles to the Romans and Corinthians: —

" Through the offence of one (Adam) many be
dead."

" Judgment was by one (Adam) to condemna-
tion."

" By one man's (Adam's) disobedience many were
made sinners."

" In Adam all die."

" The first man (Adam) is of the earth, earthy."

Blake, while conserving all the values that S. Paul
attaches to Adam, adds to the s3mibol. In the con-
tracted man the place of the imagination has been
usurped by the reason, and so Adam stands also for
the unimaginative man governed by reason.

BeslHes Geing contracted fallen man has become

GOD AND MAN 63

opaque. Perfect man is translucent. He is a stream
of transparent depth hiding nothing. His simpHcity,
innocence, and guilelessness reflect the beauty of
God. Opaque man loses the simplicity of Christ and
its place is taken by the subtlety of the serpent.
What is still worse, he loses fellowship by which
Man lives. Fellowship is effected by the inter-
penetration and flowing together of human spirits.
Man's personahty is not fixed but in the making.
When he attains to true personahty he flows into
other spirits and yet retains his identity. In his
capacity to live in his brother's bosom lies his
capacity to live the more abundant life. Fallen man
by his opacity has lost this power and become hard
and exclusive. His isolation shuts him up in self-
hood. Mercifully, again, there is a limit to opacity
(Satan), otherwise the real man could never emerge
from within his stone walls.

The natural man is always contracted and opaque,
but his qualities vary according as one state merges
into another. He may be a slave to corporeal
passions, or follow a blind instinct of unthinking,
unimaginative love, and in either case possess little
reasoning power. Blake shows an immense variety
of combinations in The Four Zoas and Jerusalem.
Generally, however, natural man is characterised by
his reasoning power which has taken the leadership,
reducing all the other qualities to servitude. Blake
traces the origin of the reasoning power to the " two

64 VISION AND VESTURE

contraries " with which every substance is clothed.
Natural man calls these two contraries good and
evil, and at once proceeds to make an " abstract " of
them. This " abstract " is a negation, and negatives
" every substance," " its own body," " every Divine
Member," in short, " everything." ^ This is the
" Holy Reasoning Power," and in its Holiness is
closed " the Abomination of Desolation." The
Reasoning power is man's spectre.

Each man is in his Spectre's power
Until the arrival of that hour,
When his humanity awake ;
And cast his Spectre into the Lake.'

It is the part of reason to work on everything
that is supplied to it by the inlets of the soul and
body. In perfect man there are a thousand inlets,
and the reason can exercise itself on those intuitions
which have a far deeper origin than itself. But in
natural man these thousand gates are closed, and
he has only the five inlets of the senses. The
Reason, with so little to work upon, is thus doomed
to failure. Having lost the divine vision and in
consequence faith, it is compelled to live by sight.
It believes only what it can touch, see, and handle.
It pursues the positive sciences and stamps out
imagination and inspiration, calling them super-
stition. It sees a part and takes it for the whole.
True, its part is immense, though but a small mani-

^ Jerusalem, lo, 7-16. 'Jerusalem, 41, 32.

GOD AND MAN 65

festation of the Infinite. It can measure the earth
with its compasses, but heaven is hidden from its
downward gaze. It can explore the heavens with
telescopes, but it finds not God. It looks at, not
through Nature. It worships efficiency and despises
God's gifts in others. Restlessly it works by demon-
stration, but is never satisfied with its demonstration.
It is finally driven by its sense of an aching void to
fashion a religion. With the aid of its rehgion it
feels competent to run the world and steer humanity
into a safe haven. One has only to think how
stupendous are the works of reason, to reaUse how
inevitably Blake personalised it. Urizen is a magni-
ficent figure to be approached with fear and
trembling and awful respect. He has many sons and
daughters whose names tower in the history of man-
kind. Bacon, Newton, Locke, Rousseau, Darwin,
George Eliot are formidable names among moderns,
worthy of such an illustrious father. When Urizen
is renewed, and his master, man, once more flings
wide his gates, he will take his rightful place in the
mental life of the Real Man; and his sons and
daughters will be remembered in the sculptured
halls of Los' Palace, because by giving body and
substance to Reason, they enabled man to cast him
out.

Man's reasoning power affects most of all his
religion with disastrous results. " Man must and
will have some religion; if he has not the religion

66 VISION AND VESTURE

of Jesus, he will have the religion of Satan, and will
erect the synagogue of Satan calUng the Prince of
this World, God; and destroying all who do not
worship Satan under the name of God." ^

Natural man begins his rehgion with ideas of good
and evil. We have already seen that Blake held
that every substance consists of two contraries
which mutually exist. The natural man separates
these contraries and calls them good and evil. He
has varied ways of dealing with these distinctions,
but he generally looks on the distinction as eternal
and especially thinks of his abstract law of good aS
the eternal, unchanging law of God. In order to
preserve the good, the evil must be destroyed. But
this is impossible. Light and darkness mutually
exist, and without darkness there can be no hght.
One does not destroy darkness to obtain light.
When the light shines the darkness vanishes, but
it is not destroyed, it has become the medium of the
light. The same is true of all contraries. Joy and
pain mutually exist. The pain is felt when sepeirated
from joy; when united, conscious pain vanishes,
yet it is the medium by which alone joy takes
possession. Natural man having abstracted his
notions of good and evil, proceeds to elaborate a
code of moral laws which he calls God's command-
ments. As such they must never be violated, and the
penalty of disobedience must be severe to ensure

^Jerusalem, 52.

GOD AND MAN ^^

obedience. Yet obedience is impossible. " They are
death to every energy of man and forbid the springs
of life." ^ When the natural religious man breaks
them he condemns himself, when he thinks he
keeps them he condemns others, and in either case
he is miserable. His failure urges him to repres-
sive measures. He sets himself severe rules of self-
discipline, fasting, and even self - chastisement.
Occasionally, by sheer will, or by help of philosophy
and reason, he succeeds in chaining his passions;
but when these energies of life are very strong, they
burst out afresh, and drive the natural, religious man
to despair. The consequences are no better when he
succeeds in his repression. The passions repressed
turn to poison and mounting to the brain infect it
with morbid fancies. The character that is ulti-
mately formed by such a process is nerveless, self-
conscious, studied, severe, and entirely lacking in
sweet spontaneity, in beautiful impassioned words
and actions, and in creative genius. Again and again
the natural religious man goes through the agonies
of repentance, and each time the iron is more
riveted in his soul. His consciousness is now almost
completely obsessed with the notion of sin, and in
his despair he is driven to formulate a doctrine of
atonement for his sin. He turns to God, but it is
a God he has created in his own image by means of
his senses and reasoning power. Since violation of

•^ Jerusalem, 35, 11.

68 VISION AND VESTURE

the commandments must in his own code be
severely punished, he necessarily thinks of God as
the Avenger exacting the penalty to the last
farthing. The debtor failing entirely to pay his debt,
God at last provides for him a righteous substitute
who meekly offers Himself to the Avenger of Sin,
receiving on His head the lightning of God's wrath,
and thereby satisfying His righteousness and His
mercy. Thus the sinner comes to shelter himself
under the vicarious sufferings of Christ. He is not
purged of his sins, but his misery is dulled and made
bearable. But liberty he has none. His reasoning
power has already killed every happy inspiration,
and bound his higher powers. No longer able to see
through Nature, he is ensnared by her witchery;
and God being the offspring of his own binding
reason, he ends by falling completely into bondage
to his God.

To understand Blake it is necessary to see what
was his attitude to the great Evangelical movement
of his time. In his prophetical books he always
refers with approval to Wesley, Whitefield, and even
Hervey whose Meditations in a Country Church
Yard are now unreadable. These men and others —
Venn, Fletcher, Beveridge, Romaine — taught as
necessary to salvation a substitutionary view of
atonement which Blake vigorously repudiated.
The real point of contact with them was their insist-
ence on the new birth. It was through their experi-

GOD AND MAN 69

cnce of the ftew birth and not through their doctrine
of atonement that Blake beUeved they attained to
liberty. John Wesley is a specially interesting case
in point. At Oxford he was intensely religious, and
full of prescribed good works. In after years he
testified that he had known nothing of the new birth,
nor did he till he went to America, and learned from
Peter Bohler the truth that freed his soul. Wesley
then at Oxford was confessedly only a natural
religious man.

Blake's understanding and appreciation of the
evangelicals and methodists can hardly have been
reciprocated. Wesley never really understood
mysticism. He designated William Law's book on
the new birth as " philosophical, speculative, pre-
carious, Behmenish, void, and vain! " Boehme
was " fustian," and Swedenborg " one of the most
ingenious, Uvely, entertaining madmen that ever set
pen to paper." However, Blake was far too much
before his time to be understood by his contem-
poraries. It is enough that he understood them,
and did them full justice.

To return to Blake's natural religious man. Once
one has grasped the prevailing characteristics of his
mind, one sees how impossible it is for the gracious
fruit of the spirit to grow out of such a soil. Self-
condemnation and despair are the best fruits of
the natural religious man's failure. There is a deep
human experience, which repeats itself in every age,

70 VISION AND VESTURE

and in all pronounced cases of conversion. When the
good man is racked with bankruptcy and despair
just then a door within opens. He becomes conscious
of hfe and strength flowing in. He knows that the
life does not originate from himself, he has nothing
to bring; but as he remains quietly receptive, the
new hfe takes hold of him and renews the springs of
his being; and he sees in a flash that henceforth if
only he can abide in this Life and this Life in him, he
can go from strength to strength, from faith to faith,
from victory to victory, from glory to glory, till he
comes face to face with Him who renewed his soul.
This was the experience of Wesley and Whitefield,
and of many of their followers. They believed that
it was in consequence of their faith in the atone-
ment. But their distorted view of atonement was
rejected by Blake. Happily saving truth is con-
veyed to lives even through misstated doctrines.
The methodists and Calvinists looking to Christ on
the Cross often grasped the Divine Love and Mercy
which thus manifested itself in supreme self-
oblation. They learned that man's highest life was
a life of service, and they reahsed in the hour of
their weakness and despair that hfe and power were
not of themselves but of God. It is in a later stage
of the regenerate life that a wrong view of the
Atonement is apt to warp the hfe because it must
always lead to a false conception of God. The
methodists and Calvinists were compelled to reaUse

GOD AND MAN 71

by their own doctrine their impotence and God's
sufficient Life. The moment of that realisation was
their deUvery as they passed from death into Ufe.
Blake passed through the same deep experience
without becoming entangled in an immoral version
of the Atonement. Many convicted souls did not
obtain to liberty. They took shelter beneath the
Cross but were not renewed. They testified in public
that they were saved, while their deeds testified
against them. This was the side of methodism
observed by Fielding, and which he was quick to
Satirise in his novels. Such results were bad enough,
but they are far worse when the natural religious
man is successful in repressing his passions and
becoming virtuous. The virtues he cultivates
are chastity, righteousness, self-control, economy,
prudence, discretion, punctuality, regularity, utiUty
and such like. Viewed closely these virtues are
seen to be manufactured not grown. They bear
the same relation to the fruit of the spirit, as the
fruits of a Christmas tree to the apples of the
orchard. And they also bring with them some ugly
mahgnant growths. Pride, contempt, and con-
demnation of others spring up like toad-stools in
the night. The natural religious moral man thanks
God that he is not hke other men; he despises God's
gifts in others; he stamps out imagination and
inspiration. He hates all innovators and rebels; he
punishes offenders relentlessly; he upholds law.

72 VISION AND VESTURE

custom, and authority; he worships efficiency; and
the everlasting word on his hps is duty.

Like all other men the natural religious man
cannot live to himself, for though his religion con-
tracts and isolates him, yet he cannot fall out of his
place as a unit in the social organism, and as such
he affects society to its furthest limits. His first
care is his own soul which he tries to save at all
costs. He never realises that it can only be saved
along with the society of which he is a member.
The social organism may also react relentlessly on
him, catching him up in its wheels and tearing him
to pieces. He is much too intent on making virtues
to be aUve to the iniquities of the state. Next to
himself the religious man is preoccupied with his
family. His pride insists on his building his house.
He seizes all the prizes he can for his sons and
daughters, and his family prospers at the expense
of others in a less favoured part of the social
organism.

Is this thy soft Family-Love,
Thy cruel patriarchal pride.
Planting thy family alone.
Destroying all the world beside? '

There is a terrible nemesis to the man who seeks
the good of his family apart from the good of society,
as Job's sons learnt when they were crushed by the
pillars of their own houses.

^Jerusalem, 27, 20.

GOD AND MAN 73

A man's worst enemies are those
, Of his own house and family;

And he who makes his law a curse,
By his own law shall surely die.

For Jerusalem the City of God can only be biiilt
when men and nations walk ' ' heart in heart and hand
in hand."

In my exchanges every land

Shall walk, and mine in every land.

Mutual shall build Jerusalem

Both heart in heart and hand in hand.

Next to planting his family the natural religious
man is anxious to secure friends. These are what
Blake calls " corporeal friends." They have nothing
to do with the real man, they rather hinder him
and therefore are spiritual enemies. They are useful
when the time comes for launching the sons into the
world; then their " interest " is often able to secure
a high official place. They are also useful as patrons
even to genius which ineffectually beats its wings
for recognition without their help. True friends are
meant for the evil days, as well as prosperous times,
but it is here that corporeal friends fail. They come
and preach patience, endurance, and indeed aU the
virtues which the rehgious man considers he has
mastered. It may happen that they hold a mirror
to the natural rehgious man of himself and drive him
to desperation and curses hke Job. He must then
either perish or turn from his corporeal friends and
cast himself on God. In the meantime man, with his

74 VISION AND VESTURE

family and friends, having seized for himself a
monopoly, some one has to pay, and in that way
poverty is created in the social organism. With
poverty comes a long train of evils — sickness, disease,
misery, crime, prostitution; and the prosperous
religious man becomes conscious that he has always
the poor with him. He cannot be easy at their
presence. He may even be vaguely aware of his
real relation to them. His conscience is perturbed,
and he seeks to soothe it and the poor by deaUng
out doles and organising lectures on thrift, hygiene
and temperance. Then the churches are enlisted, and
the clergy with the facility offered by the parochial
system visit the houses of the poor, distributing the
charities and exhorting the victims to repent.
Repentance is seldom effected. The poor man con-
tinues to drown his cares in drink, and his per-
sistent drunkenness satisfies the religious man that
nothing more can be done with him. Then he must
be handed over to the cruelties of the penal system.
The religious man's family is endangered by the
criminals at large and by the prostitutes driven on
to the streets. For his family safety, he must build
prisons for the criminals, and for his family purity,
brothels for the prostitutes. That is not the end
of the natural religious man's action on the social
organism. The mind he has fabricated for himself is
penal and forensic. Pity and forgiveness are slowly
banished until he becomes quite " blind to the

GOD AND MAN 75

simple rules of life." ^ He then " leaves the plough,
and harrow and loom, the hammer and chisel and
the rule and the compasses," and forges the " sword,
the chariot of war, the battle-axe, the trumpet fitted
to the battle," and all the arts of life he changes into
the arts of death. Since there are thousands of
natural reUgious men impressing continually their
mentality on the social organism, the State neces-
sarily becomes like a powder magazine, and then
a spark is sufficient to precipitate a whole nation into
revolution or war.

The natural religious man's development is now
as steady as the Rake's Progress. Job's boils typify
his shame, doubt, and despair. All the time there
is a hardening process. His pride will not allow
other men to differ from himself, and he will com-
pass land and sea to make one proselyte. He is so
accustomed to think of himself as the child of
privilege that he invents a doctrine of election by
which he can reject all but himself and his corporeal
friends, and so becomes a bigot. His isolation and
the shrinkage of his universe consequent on his
undue simplification of life, concentrate the rays of
his sun into one burning spot which kindles his eye,
and betrays to the observer that he has become a
fanatic. His zeal for the faith intensifies. He per-
secutes relentlessly all heretics, and when circum-
stance permits casts them into the fires which he has

^ The Four Zoas. Night VII, 660 etc.

^e VISION AND VESTURE

kindled. The Christ within dies after a long cruci-
fixion. But the man knows not that the hidden
lamp in his temple has been extinguished. Without
its light he calls evil good and good evil. When he
comes face to face with the incarnate Christ, he
shouts. Crucify Him, Crucify Him, and hands him
over with fearful exultation to the cruellest death
he can devise. Thus he and his corporeal friends sin
against the Holy Ghost for which the Christ said there
was no forgiveness. Thank God, that was not His
last word. As he fell a victim to their bitter hatred
He cried, " Father, forgive them, for they know not
what they do." To the natural religious man, Blake
says as Christ said to the religious Nicodemus: " Ye
must be born again." We have seen that the man
who has followed the path indicated by his reason
and five senses, brought through repeated failure to
despair, finds in his last extremity that a door opens
within, and he passes from death into fife. This is
a frequent way to the new birth, but it is not the
normal or the most healthy. There are some like
John the Baptist who are full of the Holy Ghost
from their Mother's womb. In all cases there is
something mysterious. " The wind bloweth where
it listeth, and thou hearest the sound thereof, but
canst not tell whence it cometh, and whither it goeth :
so is every one that is bom of the Spirit." ^ There
are very many (perhaps the greater number) who

» S. John iii. 8.

GOD AND MAN -j-j

cannot put their finger on any crisis in their hfe and
say when they were born again. That, of course, is
not important. It is important that a man should
know that he has been bom of the Spirit, otherwise
there can be no stability in his spiritual life. This
knowledge comes sooner or later when the man
gains the inward witness of the Spirit. The Spiritual
birth then becomes as certain to him as his natural
birth. Blake traces magnificently the course of the
new birth in Jerusalem. " The Breath Divine
Breathed over Albion. ... He opened his eyelids
in pain; in pain he moved his stony members. . . .
Albion rose." To him troubled in conscience and
affrighted, Jesus says: " Fear not, Albion, unless I
die thou canst not live, but if I die I shall rise again
and thou with me." . . . Albion replied: "Cannot
man exist without mysterious offering of self for
another? Is this friendship and brotherhood ? " . . .
Jesus said: " Wouldst thou love one who never
died for thee, or ever die for one who had not died
for thee ? And if God dieth not for Man and giveth
not Himself eternally for Man, Man could not exist,
for Man is Love, as God is Love; every kindness to
another is a Uttle Death in the Divine Image, nor
can Man exist but by Brotherhood." ^

Here in a few sublimely simple words Blake reveals
the true and innermost meaning of the Atonement,
which is an eternal process, enacted in history,

1 Jerusalem, 96, 1-28.

78 VISION AND VESTURE

repeated in the spiritual life of every member of
Christ, and when apprehended by conscience-
stricken, pained, and despairing man enables him
to take hold of Life and start on his upward course
with peace, joy and hope in his heart, and the inward
assurance of ultimate victory. The insistence on the
new birth, then, was the great point which Blake
had in common with his protestant contemporaries.
His attitude to the natural man was, however, very
different from theirs. Whitefield regarded the
natural man as entirely depraved. He had not a
spark of original righteousness. He was a goat, a
tare, a vessel of wrath, a child of the devil. The man
who had been born again was righteous in God's eyes,
a sheep, pure wheat, an heir of grace and a child of
God. The saved man who claimed to discern all
things could infalUbly decide who was saved and
who lost. This sharply defined distinction between
the saved and unsaved made the way of the evange-
list very simple, for it was easy to say to a man:
You are lost, I am saved, I will tell you how to
become saved. But a price must be paid for this
simple method. The saved saw no good thing in the
unsaved. He was reprobate and as such the saved
man must separate himself from his company; he
must not touch him lest he be defiled; and when he
took this Pharisaic attitude it was only one step
further to say: Depart from me for I am holier than
thou. To this day many a protestant condemns

GOD AND MAN 79

another as unsaved who is intrinsically better than
himself. Blake saw that the Real Man lay hidden in
the natural man, yet not so hidden but that he made
his presence f^lt from time to time. It was just this
recognition which softened the distinction between
the spiritual and natural man which Calvinism had
made so rigid. Because there is a limit to contrac-
tion and opacity, therefore Blake's natural man is
not altogether depraved, his original righteousness
is deeper than his original sin, and in his deeds there
gleams fitfully the presence of the Real Man. A
man may be sexually passionate, in which case the
lightning of his Real Man striking his passion into
flame will give him illumination and insight. For
this reason the passionate man has more under-
standing of hfe than the cold intellectual, and he is
nearer to the Kingdom. When he enters the King-
dom his passion undergoes transmutation, and as it
penetrates his every thought and action makes them
vital and beautiful. Again, sinners, tramps, thieves
are natural men; but they often have more reality
in them than natural religious men or settled nien
whose morahty is merely imitative. This touch of
reality makes them respond to the truth when they
hear it. Therefore Blake, Uke all men of real spiritual-
imaginative discernment, detected unerringly the
Real Man in natural men. By seeing the inner
beauty, he could love them, and his love at once
put him into simple human relationship with them

8o VISION AND VESTURE

which was wholly right and wholly Christian. To
eat with publicans and sinners, for Christ, was
neither to set a good example nor condescension, it
was the swift detection of the pulse of Ufe by Him
who was the Life indeed. To have separated Him-
self from them would have seemed to Him the worst
kind of self-righteousness and spiritual pride.

Blake's twice-born man is further to be distin-
guished from Whitefield's convert, though he
approaches more nearly to Wesley's sanctified man.
When a man is bom again, he must pass on to hdi-
ness, or else his new spiritual hfe will dwindle away
and leave him in a worse state than the first. White-
field and Toplady were frightened at any doc-
trine of Christian perfection, and for many years
Whitefield could not regard Wesley as a brother for
teaching Arminian doctrine and Christian perfec-
tion. Wesley's doctrine of the " seccmd blessing "
or " entire sanctification " or " a clean heart," as it
was variously called, when carefully sifted and re-
stated was in reality a revival of the old catholic
doctrine of sanctity. A Wesleyan saint was equiva-
lent to a Catholic saint who had reached the
unitive way. Like Wesley, Blake saw that the con-
verted man might have a great deal of the old man
in him, and the old man would ultimately prevail
unless the converted man passed on to the life of
imity. So far Blake's regenerate man and Wesley's
are alike, but Blake brings out a difference of para-

GOD AND MAN 8i

mount importance. The imagination of his twice-
born man has been set free from the tyranny of the
reasoning power. His imagination urges him to
music, art, poetry or sculpture, and when his Ufe
of unity is reached, the Real Imaginative Man takes
the supreme control and starts on creative work.
Between the new birth and this perfect hberty
there is a long period of temptation and bitter con-
flict. Through this the man must win his way with
all his courage and valour. He may pass through a
horror of great darkness, he may faint many times,
but if he carries on his mental fight manfully to the
end, his dire conflict will resolve into victory and
liberty; and then if he does not create a beautiful
work of art, he will in any case hand down a beauti-
ful legend of his life, and a life that has become a
poem is the highest work of art a man can leave the
race. In man's life there are two great spiritual
crises which theologically are called conversion and
sanctification. Either of them may be sudden or
gradual. Usually conversion takes place at adoles-
cence, and sanctification stretches over the remain-
ing lifetime: but the realisation of the truth of
conversion and sanctification is frequently in the
flash of a moment.

In the Old Testament Scriptures there are many
examples. Abraham's sanctification was immedi-
ately preceded by " a horror of great darkness "
and a symbolical act expressing the complete sur-

82 VISION AND VESTURE

render of himself by faith to God. He became father
to the child of promise, and saw in vision the whole
of the promised land to be possessed by his posterity.
Jacob's conversion was effected by his vision of a
ladder joining heaven and earth, and his sanctifica-
tion began by his wrestling all night with an angel
till the day dawned. From being Jacob the sup-
planter he became Israel the Prince with God.
Subsequently his people in the person of Moses was
taken into a high mountain, and shown the promised
land. Having seen the blessed vision, he was taken
down into the valley, and told to fight his way inch
by inch until he should take possession. Isaiah was
sanctified by his vision of the Glory of God which
convicted him of uncleanness. A live coal off the
altar of God pressed to his lips purged him, and he
became God's spokesman. Ezekiel's gradual jdeld-
ing of himself while the Hand of the Lord was heavy
■ upon him, made him a sharp instrument in the
Hand of the Lord. The classical exposition of the
whole process of sanctification is in the story of Job.
There through terrible afflictions we see Job stripped
of his natural and patriarchal religion, brought
through horrible suffering tUl at the vision of God he
repents in dust and ashes. Blake in his Job series
has seized every element in the story of Job, and
because of its universal significance has been able to
incorporate his own experience of darkness and
mental fight till he had reached the life of unity.

GOD AND MAN 83

In the New Testament the deeper experience is
called the baptism of fire or of the Holy Ghost. The
Christ's sanctification began in Jordan when the
Heavens opened and the Spirit of God descended
upon Him like a Dove. It was continued through
the temptation and suffering in the wilderness; it
reached its darkest hour in the Garden of Geth-
semane ; and was finally consummated on the Cross
when he calmly committed His Spirit into the Hands
of His Father.

The disciples entered on their sanctification on
the Day of Pentecost. The change in their lives was
speedily manifested in boldness, purity and power.

These two inward experiences were linked from
the beginning of the Apostles' ministry with two
outward rites — Baptism and the Laying on of Hands
(Confirmation), and the Church, built on the founda-
tion of the Apostles and Prophets, has preserved
these two rites ever since.

Catholicism has enriched the doctrine of sanctifi-
cation in her doctrine of Saints. As usual catholic
theology has systematised this part of man's spiritual
progress with passionate precision. Whether we
turn to the pages of the theological Saint Thomas
Aquinas, to the mystical Saints John of the Cross,
Teresa, Peter of Alcantara, or the modem Jesuit
Poulain, we shall find mapped out every inch of the
way to hoHness which was trodden by the Saints.

Protestantism has added much of deep interest

84 VISION AND VESTURE

to the literature of holiness. Jacob Boehme wrote
fully of what he had known by experience. George
Fox has revealed the history of his sanctification in
his Journal. John Bunyan has given a harrowing
account of his own " dark night " in Grace Abound-
ing. Among Blake's contemporaries William Law,
deepened by his' study of Boehme, wrote his beauti-
ful Spirit of Love, and Spirit of Prayer, dealing with
the soul's passage out of the vanity of time into
the riches of Eternity. For the most part, Calvinist
protestants like Whitefield and Toplady were
frightened at doctrines of Christian perfection. It
is to Wesley that honour must be paid for reviving
the old catholic doctrine, and making it practicable
to many thousands of his followers.

Wesley called sanctification the " second blessing,"
or " entire sanctification " or " the clean heart."
He seems to have experienced it without partaking
of Job's terrors; but many of his followers were
plunged into the dark night, and in their struggles
through to light, they often learned much mysticism
which was embodied in Charles Wesley's hymns,
and has lived on to this day. Present-day reli-
gious movements like the Salvation Army and
the Pentecostal League are really off-shoots of
methodism. The Salvation Army distinguishes the
two blessings of conversion and sanctification by
the vivid symbols of blood and fire ; and the Pente-
costal League insists that man must be baptised

GOD AND MAN 85

with the Holy Ghost and with fire before he can be
endued with power for service.

This long dark period subsequent to the new birth,
and leading to entire sanctification, is called by
Saint Thomas Aquinas the way of purgation; by
S. John of the Cross, the dark night of the soul;
by Bunyan, the valley of the Shadow of Death;
and by Blake, the Day of Judgment.

So far as I know, Blake is the first to call the
purgative way the Day of Judgment, though mystics
had always known that it was a process of judgment,
as was shown in the Gospel according to S. John.
Blake besides illustrating Job's day of judgment
gives a whole Night of The Four Zoas to Albion's day
of judgment. Here his language is largely taken from
the Bible, and as in the Bible, he pictures it as a
general judgment of the nations. But he leaves no
doubt that he is dealing with an experience of
Albion's inner life, and as such it is the way to his
liberty and the building of Jerusalem.

The day of judgment begins with trouble. The
man finds his sun darkened, his moon torn down,
and his heavens cracked across. It is a terrible time
when those things are shaken which he has always
taken for granted. It seems then as if everything
would go and he must find himself in the terrors of
Non-existence. To add to his sufferings the fires of
eternity fall with " loud and shrill sound of loud
trumpet thundering along from heaven to heaven."

86 VISION AND VESTURE

These fires are never quenched until they have
accompUshed their work by searching out every
minutest particular in man's soul and body. The
man is plunged without power to draw back into a
baptism of fire. The fire flaming through aU the
intricate labyrinths of man's inward being releases
aU that the natural reUgious man has repressed.
Passion flares up in a " fierce raving fire," and the
man is pursued by the things he has oppressed.
The trumpet continues to sound till everything in
man starts forth trembling subject to the " flames of
mental fire." All that has been built up by natural
religion, which Blake calls mystery is cast into the
flames, till " Mystery's tyrants are cut off and not
one left on earth." Then the " living flames winged
with intellect and reason " invade the Holy City of
man's spirit. The man, his heart weak and his head
faint, is distracted by the war within his members,
and cries to his reasoning power (Urizen) to help him.
He finds that no help is forthcoming. His eyes are
sufficiently open to see Urizen in his real nature,
and he denounces his self-destrojdng, beast-formed
science, and curses him as the first author of war by
his religion and destroyer of honest mind into con-
fused perturbation, and strife, and horror, and pride.
For Urizen devoiured by the flame of judgment,
nothing remains, unless he repents, but to be left
" as a rotten branch to bum, with Mystery the
harlot and with Satan for ever and ever." Urizen

GOD AND MAN 87

is convicted of sin and weeps. He sees that in spite
of all the cities and towers he has built, he has
utterly failed to find pleasure, joy or wisdom. He
has sought in " Spaces remote the eternal which
is always present to the wise; " and " for pleasure,
which, unsought, falls round the infant's path." ^
He, the labourer of ages, at last turns his back on
the void which he has made, discovering that
" Futurity is in this moment." He then ceases
from all repressive measures, and releasing passion
allows it to rage as it will. Urizen has persisted in
his folly, till he has become wise. Shaking off his
cold snows, he renews his radiant youth, and rises
into the heavens in naked majesty. Thus the man
passes through the first great phase of his day of
judgment. Natural religion has been consumed,
false methods of morality abandoned, and the youth
of his reasoning power renewed.

Man is still very far. from unity. The trumpet
continues to sound, and the dead arise and " flock to
the trumpet, fluttering over the sides of the grave
and cr3dng in the fierce wind round the heavy rocks
and mountains filled with groans." ^

There is a strange miscellaneous company, fathers,
friends, and mothers, infants, kings, and warriors,
priests, captives, slaves, merchants, warriors,
tyrants. Here Blake is compelled to keep to the

1 The Four Zoas. Night IX. 169-173.
' The Four Zoas. Night IX. 241 et seq.

88 VISION AND VESTURE

general language of the Day of Judgment since it is
hardly possible to press it into the subjective experi-
ence of the individual man without being over-
ingenious. Still one thing is very clear. After Urizen
has ascended to the Heavens, and man's manifold
powers are let loose, it must seem to the man that
unity is further off than ever; and amid the wild
confusion and mutual recriminations of his inimical
powers, his brain reels till he hardly knows whether
he has not gone mad.

The effort to keep sane must be made, for the
renewed reason has a great work to perform.
Urizen and his sons, who had originally forged
weapons of war, now abandon " the spear, the bow,
the gun, the mortar. They level the fortifications.
They beat the iron engines of destruction into
wedges." ^ The wars of this world are the outward
manifestation of the lusts that wage in man's
members. In spite of the fearful confusion, man
has advanced a long way when he renounces the
weapons of destruction. In their place the sons of
Urizen seize the plough and harrow, the spade, the
mattock and axe, and the heavy roller to break the
clods. With the help of these peaceful tools Urizen
proceeds to deal with the rocky, mountainous, and
sandy parts of man's inner condition. In addition
to the fire that rages all the time man is subjected to
the plough and harrow, which can only seem to him

• The Four Zoas. Night IX. 302.

GOD AND MAN 89

instruments of torture. But Urizen having set his
hand to the plough never turns back. He prepared
the land; then seizing the trembling souls of all the
dead who stand before him, flings them as seed into
the imiversal field. After that, he and his wearied
sons sit down to rest and quietly await the human
harvest.

We have seen that, when Urizen removed his
restraining hand, all the repressed powers of man
rose up. Foremost among these was passion (Ore).
At first passion rages with increased fury and
regenerate man is tempted as never before. Every
moment threatens to engulf him ; and he feels him-
self plunged into the hell of voluptuousness. But
Ore (passion) flaming encounters the mental flames,
and he consumes himself " expending all his energy
against the fuel of fire." ^ The man can then take
Ore and hand him over to Urizen once more, who
having learned the value of passion, no longer desires
to repress it. Ore had set himself above the human
form divine. From that high station he had
been thrown down into dark obUvion. Then after
" incessant pangs " and " stern repentance " he
" renews his brightness " till he resumes the image
of the human. He then co-operates in the bUss of
man, obeys his will and becomes a servant " to the
infinite and eternal of the human form." The
supreme value of passion in Blake's teaching has

' The Four Zoas. Night IX. 356.

go VISION AND VESTURE

become apparent. His havoc in unregenerate man
may be terrible; but once a servant of the re-
generate man, he becomes the best of all servants,
serving in all man's mental pursuits, quickening
all man's joyous perception of beauty, beautif3dng
all man's social dealings with his brother.

Closely connected with Ore are Luvah and Vala.
Luvah's victims are love-sick youths and maidens.
The regenerate man is as susceptible to Cupid's
arrow as the unregenerate; in many cases he is more
so. The nerve centres of love and religion are next
to each other, and what stirs the one stirs the other.
Many a devout and conscientious youth is dis-
tracted because just when he is enjopng a sudden
religious exaltation, his senses take fire, and his
religious emotion degenerates into gross eroticism.
This is well known to the saints; and man does not
gain his liberty till he has passed through his day of
judgment to the bitter end. Thus to his other woes
regenerate man has added the pangs of love-sick-
ness. He cannot sing or dance, he can only howl and
writhe in shoals of torment and fierce flames con-
suming. To sharpen his miseries his love often
takes a sadistic or masochistic form, when Luvah's
daughters take " a cruel joy " in " lacerating with
knives and whips their victims," and Luvah's sons
indulge in " deadly sport." In this unveiling of
hidden lusts effected by man's day of judgment, he
comes face to face with palpable evil. He can make

GOD AND MAN 91

no terms with it. Here resentment is his safeguard.
The triumph of lust is the triumph of the sat}^:, the
beast, the gargoyle, and the destruction of the man.
With resolute scorn he must arise and cast out the
beast if ever he is to attain to his divine humanity.
In the first love affairs of youths and maidens, there
is much innocence, poetry and beauty, but being
largely based on curiosity they are also fleeting.
It is not until men and women have been purged
by the fierce fires of the day of judgment that they
can form lasting attachments, in which they main-
tain mutual self-respect and reverence for each
other's identity. Here, too, renewed Ore is a servant.
By joining man and woman in pure passion, he
contributes to their innocent joy, and crowns their
happiness with fruit. For the reader to see Luvah
and Vala renewed I must refer them to the surpass-
ingly beautiful passages in The Four Zoas^ where
Blake shows them in their pastoral innocence. And
so man's redemption draws near. Besides his
natural rehgion being consumed, his false moraUty
abandoned, and his reason renewed, he has made
passion his servant, and instead of a torment love
has become a joy in his hfe.

Throughout all his fiery judgment man is un-
learning as well as learning; and unlearning is
accompanied by terrors which contribute to the
desolate misery of the overburdened man. The

1 The Four Zoas. Night IX. 420 et seq.

92 VISION AND VESTURE

natural man created God in his own image. The
image of the natural man was fashioned by his
reason working on what was supplied by the five
senses. Hence his God was limited, contracted,
wrathful, exacting, penal, sternly heaping his
punishments on the disobedient even to everlast-
ing punishment, and preparing rewairds for the
righteous even to everlasting bliss. When man is
regenerate he is still for a long time impeded by
worshipping a God with feet of clay, and by seeing
his God only through the distorting medium of false
religious doctrines. False religions are devils, and
these devils are exorcised and cast into the deep
only when the Day of Judgment has accomplished
its work. Every false conception of God is an idol
set up in the heart. In the " chamber of man's
imagery " are engraven " every form of creeping
things, and abominable beasts," ^ while he himself
stands in the centre swinging his censer to the
creatures of his own hand. Man becomes hke the
image of his worship, but God is the true Image of
Man's worship, and the false image must be melted
and destroyed in the fires of the Judgment Day.
While the image is melting man is terrified at the
prospect of atheism, but all the time the Refiner of
gold sits gazing into the turgid seething mass. He
continues to gaze till the dross is purged, and His
own Image reflected in the pure molten gold: then
' Ezekiel viii. 9-12.

GOD AND MAN 93

He knows it is time to draw the gold out of the fires
because the fires have done their work. Man's
religious doctrines are judged one by one. His
doctrine of substitutionary Atonement must go.
Through this doctrine man saw a wrathful God pro-
pitiated by the death of His Son, and through Him
induced to forgive the sinner who takes hold of the
innocent victim and offers him in his stead. Such a
God is wrathful, cruel, arbitrary, penal, vindictive;
and He must be obliterated out of man's heart before
man can see Him as everlasting mercy, forgiving
sins always and sorrowing in all the pangs of His
creatures. Christ hanging on the Cross finally teaches
the judged man that God lives by self-oblation;
that the Man who offers Himself to do God's will is
ever the victim of the natural religious man — the
Lamb slain before the foundation of the world; — and
that the suffering Christ is the sjrmbol of God's
suffering till His creatures return to Him, and by
living their lives joyfully in Him, put an end to the
sorrow and crjdng of a world that has gone astray.
" Blessed are the pure in heart for they shall see
God," and they see Him as a God whose love burns
in judgment, till the fire becomes a fount of living
waters, Again the fires of judgment deliver man
from the bondage of the letter into the freedom of
the spirit. While he is in bondage to the letter he is
terrified at higher critics, and in the name of the
letter denounces and persecutes men of the Spirit

94 VISION AND VESTURE

as the worst enemies of religion. Yet it is the man
who worships the letter who is killed by the letter,
and he always has the fear of the letter giving way,
and leaving him without a religion. Man has to
learn the value of words, and the value of nominalism,
but he has also to go behind the words and names
of things, and until he does so, he cannot have
fellowship with his brother who adopts different
words and a different sjmibolism to himself. If a
man lets go the letter of Scripture for its spirit, he
will find that the spirit will ultimately give him back
the letter. And so little by little the Day of Judg-
ment releases contracted and opaque man out of
his prison. No longer contracted, he no longer con-
tracts God. His opacity imprisoned him, now he
finds his prison was the hollow of God's hand. God
is all -present, all -knowing, all -mighty. In that
vision of God he has burst his fetters. He now
knows that he is God's Image. In finding God he has
found himself, and in finding himself he has found
God. He can look back over the fiery way, and see
that as his false conceptions of Incarnation and
Atonement, of Resurrection and Ascension, of
Inspiration, and of the Church were burned away, he
gained a true conception of these things ; and as no
man's life can be right unless his beliefs are right, in
purifying his behefs he has purged his life of smoke
and dirt, and made it a pure flame off the Altar of
God.

GOD AND MAN 95

One is compelled to deal singly with the parts of
man as they are brought through the fire of judg-
ment. But one must not be led into regarding man
as multiple. All divisions of man into spirit, soul
and body, or more simply into soul and body are
useful only for purposes of analysis. Even man's
body in Blake's teaching is a part of the soul dis-
cerned by the five senses, for man is one. After
analysing him in parts, one must get back as quickly
as possible to regarding him as a unit, for the breath
of life escapes in an ansilytical process, and we should
rapidly find ourselves working in an anatomy
laboratory or an evil-smelling charnel house.

It is not easy — owing doubtlessly to perverse
habits of thought — to think of man as one even
when we come to deal with his self-hood. At once
we find ourselves speaking of a higher self and lower
self or a real self and a phenomenal self. Christ's
reiterated words: " He who would save his life will
lose it, and he who loses his life shall find it," avoid the
duahty but the words necessarily remain a paradox.

In modern thought the preaching of self-realisa-
tion easily becomes the worst kind of egotism, and
to avoid misunderstanding one is driven back to the
lower and higher self and to explain that the reaUsa-
tion of the lower self is egotism, even if as refined
as Sir Willoughby Patterne's; and the realisation
of the higher self is hfe and salvation, and the only
thing ultimately that is of value to the social

96 VISION AND VESTURE

organism. If I still use this language let it be clearly
understood that I do not mean that there are really
two selves. There is one self, and one desire. When
the desire fixes on any object, immediately it draws
into the self the essence of the object, and man is
transformed into the image of that which he desires.
The desire is a great thirst which remains unslaked
until it centres in God. Then it draws God into the
self, and the self is changed into the image of God.
The Real-self loves God, desires God, gives itself to
God, but ofttimes it is only after many false roads
have been tried that it finds itself at last at the feet
of God. During its passage it has taken the colour
of its surroundings; if they have been low, it has
appeared as a lower self, if its environment is God, it
shines out in human majesty, and makes itself felt
by its convincing reality.

The great work of the Day of Judgment is to
deliver man from self-hood which binds him in a
narrow prison ; and to break down all barriers until
man, one with the pulsing life of the universe and
with God, attains to perfect liberty. Man's con-
tracted and opaque state makes him appear to him-
self a detached unit. For a long time he never
questions his detachment, and every political and
religious step that he takes is dictated by this con-
viction. Politically he must always be conservative
if he is fortunate in this world's goods, lest a change
should endanger his possessions; if he is unfor-

GOD AND MAN 97

tunate, he will be a radical or socialist, with the
hope that his own condition will improve. Religi-
ously, we have seen, his first thought is to save his
soul, and his second to preserve his family. His
rehgion need not be entirely selfish, it may make
him zealous to help others to maintain themselves.
His philanthropy is entirely directed to this end.
His good works, his charities, even to bestowing all
his goods to feed the poor, help to keep man from
■'losing himself." His religion and poHtics tend to
isolate him more and more tiU all communication
with the spirit of life in the universe is broken. No
longer able to delight in the earth and sea, the sky
and the clouds, the meadows and trees which cost
nothing, he seeks artificial pleasures for which he
pays a heavy price. His unnatural life tells on his
health, and he goes on the first opportunity for
change of air. If he is rich he goes to Monte-Carlo
and enjoys the feverish excitement of gambling,
forgetful of the blue depths of the Mediterranean.
If he is not ijch he goes to a popular watering-place.
Through him the sea-side places are spoilt one by
one. The popular sea-side resort reeks with an
atmosphere which would quickly poison man's
spiritual springs, were it not for the sea-breezes which
happily he cannot escape. Blake knew well how
priceless a little home by the sea might be, when he
lived at Felpham. Even now Felpham is not spoilt,
and much of it remains as Blake saw it. The sudden

G

98 VISION AND VESTURE

transition from Felpham to Bognor is apalling as
it makes one realize what man does with his
favourite watering towns. Man's self-hood blinds
him to the true value of things. He builds vulgar
houses in which he can make an ostentatious
display of wealth; he vitiates the cinematograph;
he demands bad plays and kills good ones (and
good playwrights !). by refusing to go to them; he
devours sentimental novels, buys gaudy pictures,
listens to luscious music, and leaves the creators of
beautiful things to die by neglect.

Man's self-hood is slowly rent by the fires of
judgment. The vision of One who died for him
teaches him that God Uves only by self-oblation
which means God is love; and that he can only live
on the same terms because man is love also. The
self is finally lost " in the contemplation of faith and
wonder at the Divine Mercy." ^ Even as he gazes
his afflictions pass away, for the furnaces which
tortured him, become Fountains of Living Waters
flowing from the Humanity Divine. He becomes
what he beholds. All barriers and all separateness
are consumed. Man loses himself in the larger life
of the universe. Yet just when his self-hood is torn
to shreds he finds himself. For

The Lamb of God has rent the veil of mystery, soon to return
In clouds and fires around the rock, and thy mysterious tree.
And as the seed waits eagerly watching for its flower and fruit,
Anxious its little soul looks out into the clear expanse

1 Jerusalem 96, 31.

GOD AND MAN 99

To see if hungry winds are abroad with their invisible array.
So Man looks out in tree, and herb, and fish and bird and beast.
Collecting up the scattered portions of his immortal body
Into the elemental forms of everything that grows.
He tries the sullen north wind, riding on its angry furrows.
The sultry south when the sun rises, and the angry east
When the sun sets and the clods harden and the cattle stand
Drooping, and the birds hide in their silent nests. He stores his

thoughts
As in store-houses in his memory. He regulates the forms
Of all beneath and all above, and in the gentle west
Reposes where the Sun's heat dwells. He rises to the Sun,
And to the planets of the night, and to the stars that gild
The Zodiacs, and the stars that sullen stand to north and south:
He touches the remotest pole, and in the centre weeps
That Man should labour and sorrow, and learn and forget and

return
To the dark valley whence he came, and begin his labours anew.
In pain he sighs, in pain he labours, and, his universe
Sorrowing in birds over the deep, or howling in the wolf
Over the slain, and moaning in the cattle, and in the winds.
And weeping over Ore and Urizen in clouds and dismal fires.
And in the cries of birth and in the groans of death his voice
Is heard throughout the universe. Wherever a grass grows
Or a leaf buds, the Eternal Man is seen, is heard, is felt.
And aU his sorrows, till he re-assumes his ancient bliss.

At last after long mental fight out of the fires of
judgment Blake's Real Man emerges. He is the
Ancient of Days, he is Job redeemed, he is Ezekiel,
he is Blake himself, he is the beginning of new ages.
Let us try to seize his salient characteristics.

Real Man is a unity containing four Mighty
Ones. Foremost he has, more, he is a splendid
imagination. His imagination is vision. Imagina-
tion is Eternal. Through imagination he feasts
at Messiah's table, drinking the wine of Eternity.

100 VISION AND VESTURE

Through imagination he enters the great com-
munion of Saints, and with piercing vision detects
brothers and sisters among the fallen and outcast.
He has passed through the valley of the shadow of
Death, and henceforth starts at no shadows, and
neither tastes nor sees Death. Through imagination
he ranges over all the Past, and in joy creates the
Future. Every picture he paints is a window into
Eternity; his poems are the wine of Eternity; his
music the passion of Eternity; his architecture the
grand forms of Eternity. Through Imagination he
is Lord of Heaven and Earth and Hell, and these
three are One. Through Imagination he is a child
and a God. Besides Imagination he has Reason.
His reason inspired by imagination becomes winged
intellect. His intellect is swift and clean, and cuts
hke a sharp sword. It informs all his words making
them the Word of God. It delivers him from ab-
straction and vagueness, from sentimentalism and
softness, from wooUiness and unreality, from fog,
mist and dreams. Through his greatest love and pity,
mercy and tenderness, his intellect gleams, assuring
one that under all there is a hard steel-hke quality
which preserves him from becoming a mush of soft-
ness. His intellect discovers to him the comic even in
himself, and as he laughs with hearty good humour
he infects all with a spirit of cleanhness and health.
His imaginative intellect informs his affections
and einotions. As he no longer lives to himself but

GOD AND MAN loi

for his brother, he sanctifies himself for the sake of
his brother. Having suffered from corporeal friends,
he will bind to his bosom spiritual friends whose
identity he will above all things respect. His friend-
ships in the eye of the world may appear cold; but
they will be cemented by the invisible fire of the
spirit and able to defy space and time, height and
depth, hfe and death, and be a perennial source of
joy and bliss.

The Real Man is a sociable being. He does not
imagine he can love all alike, but by keeping the
central fire of his loves pure and passionate, there
flows forth a stream of brotherly love, which, taking
its rise from the Eternal Fount, never dwindles;
and he is able to love his brothers according to the
measure of their receptivity. In simple reality he
and they have become essentially one, whUe each
preserves his identity; and he never dreams of
seeking his good apart from his brothers' welfare.
He may differ in the social measures to be adopted;
but the measures are always with a single eye to his
brothers' well-being.

In his love he is a romantic, but never an erotic.
His Real life began by self-oblation, and in his love
he gives himself continually. The woman is fre-
quently tempted to give even to her identity — to be
as the dust beneath her Lord's chariot wheel, and
the man too in his hot youth is in dajtiger of letting
love encroach on his identity. If he does, he forfeits

I02 VISION AND VESTURE

for a time his manhood ; and for a few brief ecstatic
days, lets slip the highest human prize. The Real
Man gives his essence and guards zealously his
identity, and is thereby enabled to maintain a high,
chivalrous, romantic love, which, taking its rise in the
imagination, is stamped and sealed with the per-
manent quality of the imagination itself.

The Real Man is above all things a creature of
passion. When he learned in his day of judgment that
passion was not to be repressed, he quickly gauged
its real value. The mental fires fed by imagination
caught the passional fires and purged them. The
fire of passion then mounted like fiery sap into the
imagination itself, into the intellect and the emotions
until it penetrated every part of the Real Man. The
man found he was not called to build up a laborious
character, or compelled to do continually the things
he hated, but to trust and follow his real instincts
and impulses. At once his life began to grow like
the liUes. He had at last found the thing which he
passionately loved to do. There were incidental
pains and unavoidable drudgery, but these were
willingly endured by his passionate love of his work.
There came, too, a note of spontaneity and mystery.
No one could tell what he would say or do next.
His words and deeds had gained an arresting beauty.
He was much preoccupied with social service. He
thought of himself among his brethren as one that
serveth. And he had much to give. Yet all was

GOD AND MAN 103

given in great simplicity. Nothing was calculated.
He lived and thought, and spoke and acted with
passion, and in that passion was created his own
character. Whether or not he left works of art
behind him, he was an artist in character. He was
simple and guileless, understanding and forgiving,
unchanging in love and quick to perceive; a lamb
yfet also a lion; meek yet capable of terrible wrath;
a master of wit and God-like humour, of satire and
tender heaUng words; of masculine force and
maternal solicitude; and with all he kept the sweet,
transparent innocency of a child who could never
grow old.

Of recent years attempts have been made to
throw out fresh conceptions of human values. At first
vaguely and then much more definitely the new type
took shape in Nietzsche's mind, and he called it
superman. He claimed that superman was a better
type than the Christ type; that if Jesus Christ
had not died so young. He might even have lived
to realise it Himself. In the name of this new
conception a vigorous attack has been made on
Christianity. I hope to show later on, that Nietzsche,
like Schopenhauer, made a capital mistake in con-
founding Christianity with Buddhism. In extenua-
tion one might point out that Christianity has not
been able to escape the fate which awaits all
religions which make disciples. The disciples claim
to have the mind of the Master, but even while the

104 VISION AND VESTURE

Master is striving to pass on his message to his dis-
ciples, it becomes diluted and more diluted until
a religious genius arises and restores again the
Master's Gospel. If Christianity is what Nietzsche
took it to be, it deserves all he said against it. But
was Christ Himself like the portrait Christianity
has given of Him? Christ has suffered in becoming
a universal ssnnbol; it has allowed Christians to
make Christ in their own image, just as they have
created God in their own image. Owing to this
tendency and also to the fragmentary nature of the
gospel according to the four Evangelists, it is ex-
tremely difficult to gain a clear conception of the
Person of Christ. The higher criticism of the last
hundred years has done much to make Him live
again. Side by side with modern criticism, the
modern type of superhuman value has striven to com-
plete itself. In spite of blurred Unes, and weaknesses
and palpable extravagancies, its main Uneaments
stand out clear and beautiful. Now the startling
fact is that on turning to Blake's long neglected
Prophetical Books, all these lineaments are there
discovered; and what is still more startling is that
Blake claimed no new conception. He hacked his
way through false Christianities which distorted
the Image of Christ, until he saw the Face of Christ
Himself, and at once he dedicated his magnificent
imagination to deUneating in his prophetic books
what he had seen; and to portrasdng with all his

GOD AND MAN 105

might the picture of Christ which stands out in
strong rehef in his Everlasting Gospel. By his power
to enter into the sculptured Halls of Los' Palace,
Blake renewed the blurred Image of Christ Himself,
and this Image is the realised ideal of the modem
superman.

PART II
CHAPTER XII

GOETHE, SCHOPENHAUER, NIETZSCHE, STRINDBERG

There can be no doubt that Nietzsche's influence
in our time has been enormous. Our young men,
whether they read him or not, are steeped in him;
and in every coimtry of the world where there is any
pretence to culture he is read. Not only the young
men, but men of renown in philosophy, hterature,
poetry and art aU betray that Nietzsche has been
a large factor in their mental development. In his
Ecce Homo Nietzsche wrote of Thus Spake Zara-
thustra, " There is not a single passage in this revela-
tion of truth which had already been anticipated
and divined by even the greatest among men." He
looked to Shakespeare and Goethe, Dante, and the
priestly poets of the Veda, in vain, for a peer. No
doubt Dante is seven heavens removed from
Nietzsche; but Goethe on his Olympian Mount
could have breathed in his atmosphere; and cer-
tainly the creator of the superman Caesar might
have written not a few passages of the superman
Zarathustra. In looking for a peer, Nietzsche over-

io6

GOETHE 107

looked Blake, who, though a century before him,
yet now looms larger, and has entered on a surer
immortality. Nietzsche's great feat was the redemp-
tion of hell. Blake had done more than redeem hell,
he had presented her as a chaste bride to heaven.
It is this marriage which satisfies our modem need;
and it is because Nietzsche falls short of it that he
must, in our estimation, take a second place to
Blake. The relation between the two men becomes
much clearer if one studies Nietzsche's relation to
his century.

The nineteenth century made one long effort and
failed ignobly to effect a union of art and religion.
The mightiest Christian artists had been much more
than Christian. Michael Angelo and Leonardo da
Vinci were children of the renascence of Greek
culture: the most Christian soul — Fra Angelico —
could paint exquisite angels, but not robust men.
For the greatest artists need to look upon many
things with love, from which the Giottos and
Angelicos would have turned away with dismay.
Art had flourished most just before the advent of
the great religious reformers ; and when Savonarola
and Luther hurled their " Shalt nots," it was
inevitable that they should be regarded as icono-
clasts whose doctrines struck at the roots of all
vigorous art. Christianity incurred the reproach of
being the great negation. As the nineteenth century
advanced it became clearer and clearer that great

io8 VISION AND VESTURE

art was a creation of great vitality, and that passion
was the sap of vitaUty. To kill passion was to dry
up the tree and render it unfruitful. The Christianity
of the past had been hostile to passion, and the
approved saints had crucified it. Hence it seemed
only too clear to the nineteenth century thinkers
that no passion meant no art, and that specifically
Christian art was bloodless. Goethe was the first
great example. He was brought up in protestantism.
As his feeling for the beautiful grew more intense,
his Christian conscience became uneasy and finally
uttered its prohibition. At once he formulated the
great dilemma which has persisted ever since. Either
reHgion or art; and he chose art not only to
satisfy his aesthetic cravings, but also to fill up the
void left by religion. Goethe's immediate successor
was Schopenhauer.

Schopenhauer took the dualism for granted. In
him the fires of life were waning, and he was
temperamentally compelled to declare that life was
an unmitigated evil. Pain is inseparable from Ufe,
therefore cease to live. The world is the pictorial
idea cast by the will of the observer, and so long as
there is a will to live, it must persist. Kill the will
to Uve and the universe dissolves into nothing.
Schopenhauer was quite aware that his pessimistic
philosophy was Buddhism, but he made the curious
mistake of thinking that Christianity was nihilistic
too in its essence — a notion he imbibed unthinkingly

SCHOPENHAUER 109

from Goethe who had fallen into the error when he
conceived that Christianity was antagonistic to art.
Allowing for this mistake, Schopenhauer translated
the dogmas of Christianity fairly accurately into
the terms of his philosophy. The system was quite
simple. Buddhism, Christianity and Schopenhauer
aimed at the denial to live as a means to the peace
of nothingness: till that was accomplished the
pain of living must be cheated as much as possible.
Schopenhauer cheated his pain by wine, cigars and
the most seductive art. The process made the gulf
between religion and art, heaven and hell, wider
than ever.

Schopenhauer's mantle was taken up by Nietzsche
and donned with youthful enthusiasm. By this
time the divorce between heaven and hell was so
wide that Nietzsche could not beb'eve that heaven
was more than a pious fiction, and he plunged into
the fires of hell, and by its fires fashioned, after
many years of horrible pain, his new creation —
Superman.

Nietzsche having i^queezed the utmost out of
Schopenhauer transcended him, and that was his
finest achievement. It was a transition from the
denial of the will to live to the completest yea to
hfe. With his yea to life he mounted with eagle
wing till he accepted pain, reset tragedy, redeemed
the past, and dancing with BacchanaHan gaiety
shouted, Encore. Thus he accomplished a magnifi-,

no VISION AND VESTURE

cent progress from a muling nay to life to a
Dionysian Amen to the eternal recurrence ot
existence.

Nietzsche did not attain all at once to his passion-
ate yea to life. When he overcame Schopenhauer he
passed through a long positivist stage. His posi-
tivism was a reaction not only to the vague Christian
idealism which still Hved on in him unconsciously,
but also to some centuries of German mysticism
which had survived in philosophical form in Kant
and Fichte, and which modern apostles of CTilture
still read and rather Uked. German mysticism from
Tauler to Boehme and then to Novalis was vulner-
able to criticism as were all mysticisms of the past.
Henry Suso could enjoy his ecstasies almost con-
tinuously and remain rapturously unconscious of
what was going on in the world. Besides this, he and
the rest preached an unnatural doctrine of death to
self. We may know, if we take the trouble to probe
to the bottom of the mystics, that they aimed at
death to self in order to attain to the real self; but
their language was less clear than their aims, and
those whose intelligence was unequal to piercing
through the verbiage, caught up the language in its
first and obvious meaning, and set about morbidly
to kill self, and only succeeded in keeping it alive in
its most disagreeable form. Jacob Boehme over-
came the confusion; his disciple Gichtel was its
victim. Nietzsche rebounded from these distortions

NIETZSCHE 111

of nature, and protested against all idealisms as a
denial of realism, against heaven as a denial of earth,
against the supernatural as a denial of the natural,
and against death to self as a denial of the only real
value in each man. His hearty advocacy of earth
brought a breezy atmosphere into his spirit, and
deUvered him from squeamishness. He dehghted
in the frank pagan earthiness of Petronius and
pronounced him clean; he was drawn by the abound-
ing energy of the Italian humanists, whatever
direction the energy might take, and imagined with
delight the possibilities with Caesar Borgia as Pope.
He was specially in sympathy with the intellectual
cleanness of such a modern French atheist as Prosper
Merimee. His grip of reality reminds one of Ibsen.
It made him suspicious of all but positive values,
and was at the root of his criticism of Christ. Dis-
missing with contempt Renan's explanation of the
type of Jesus as the idea of genius and the idea of
hero, he proceeds to accuse Him of an instinctive
hatred of all reality, and as only able to be at ease
in the unreal inner world of the Kingdom of God.
The criticism is deeply characteristic of Nietzsche,
but can hardly be proved of Jesus, as it depends too
much on the gaps and silences of the Gospel story-
omissions that have proved equally useful to the
cathoUe reading of Christ. This sense for reality led
Nietzsche to affirm the value of self. The doctrine is
less revolutionary than appeared at the time. At

112 VISION AND VESTURE

bottom it was the same recognition of the Real Self
which Blake discovered by his experience of re-
generation, which the German mystics had stvmibled
upon unwittingly, and which Jesus Himself had
taught in His, Thou shalt love thy neighbour as
thyself, and which He exemplified by His hfe of
sublime egotism. Nietzsche did not stop at posi-
tivism, naturalism, realism, their values remained
with him to the end, but he disengaged from them
the spirit of rationalism; and when he came com-
pletely to himself in Zarathustra they had fallen
into their right places, and the sentences of Zara-
thustra might easily be taken for the inspired
utterances of a lofty mystic.

At this time, too, Nietzsche freed himself from the
conception of absolute morals. He instanced Kant
and George Eliot as examples of those who over-
throw the Christian God and retain the Christian
morals. His knowledge of George Eliot was super-
ficial, and so he could not knowthat her ethical system
was not Christian. Still it is quite true that Kant
tried to keep Christian Ethics, and that many have
failed to realize that if it is necessary to transvalue
Christian dogmas, it is equally necessary to trans-
value Christian morals; but the very fact tha:t
morals can be transvalued at once proves that though
they are absolute in God,^ in man they are evolving.
Nietzsche's transvaluation is fine; but here again it

1 I.e. in the Trinitarian God, the Unitarian God has no morals.

NIETZSCHE 113

was hardly as original as he imagined. Nietzsche's
morality (one cannot get rid of the word !) was a yea to
life for each individual. The most vital man is
the most moral. Practically whatever the wholly
" living " man does is right. Some have taken excep-
tion to Christ's treatment of the Pharisees, to His
treatment of His Mother, to His words to the Syro-
Phoenician woman, to His angry cleansing of
the Temple. The Catholic Church and Protestant
Churches too, have insisted on His sinlessness. It
would be difficult to defend His conduct by any
known code of morals, or even by His Sermon on
the Mount; but if these acts were examples of
exuberant Hfe, then from a Nietzschean point of
view they were right, and a sinless Christ is once
more given back to us. Apart from the Gospel story,
however, many instances might be given of the
tendency to antinomianism in the writings of
catholic mystics, and of sound protestant evan-
gelicals. Bunyan's dislike of the Town MoraUty
is an instance; and when analysed the protes-
tant's scorn of good works as dead works and his
insistence on conversion preceding acceptable works,
means that only the works of living men are good;
and this doctrine is wonderfully like Nietzsche's.

Nietzsche's positivism was a stage to himself.
Zarathustra is the yea to life carried to the creative
point — the point in which all the human values are
transvalued, and instead of man, there emerges

H

114 VISION AND VESTURE

Superman. Schopenhauer in spite of his pessimism
left one magnificent conception — the will to live.
It was this will to live which freed Europe from the
paralysing grip of Darwinism, for it made evolution
depend, not on a mechanical law, but on will and
life. Professor Hering of Prague and then Samuel
Butler were the links leading to Bergson's fine con-
ception — Creative Evolution. Nietzsche inherited
from Schopenhauer the idea of the will to hve, but
finding hfe inseparable from power, he changed the
phrase, and made his superman the creation of the
will to power. Hence Superman is emphatically not
a Darwinian. He is a new organ of the hfe-power
which, having made many attempts and become dis-
satisfied with them, tries again, and produces some-
thing which surpasses man. Superman is rooted
deep down in earth and is in consequence clean,
sweet and real. He is always faithful to the Real
Self, for how else could he find his work ? This faith-
fulness delivers him from servility and weakness.
He finds that not only self-pity but other-pity is
enervating, and having passed through his Geth-
semane gains the heights like Him on the cross who
reviewing His life attains to the mystic imion of
tragedy and comedy as He utters His, It is finished.
Having exorcised the spirit of gravity by the spirit
of laughter, his feet become light and he dances;
he turns from the sorcery of Wagner's music and
sings to the sunnier music of the South, Should his

NIETZSCHE 115

irrepressible mirth thirst for a melancholy draught,
Chopin can give him exquisite delight. He is not
understood, and the Scribes and Pharisees, the
Priests and the Scholars deride him. He no longer
inveighs against them with bitter tongue, but,
having overcome all resentment, rises far above
them by forgiving them. He disdains to be other
than himself. Is he not conscious of a pulsing life?
Are not his instincts to be trusted ? The life within
is strong enough to fashion him without his taking
thought for his stature. One pauses. Is one dealing
with the Saint or the Superman? Not the Saint.
True, the Saint is elect, and Zarathustra believes
in election, but in his self-election he becomes
contemptuous. The herding mob is poisoned by
resentment. It promulgates its sociaHsms and demo-
cracies to drag higher men down to its level. In his
disdain Zarathustra cannot conceive that among the
herd may be higher men crushed by the tyranny of
circumstance. In his jealousy for the Superman he
overlooks human values. Like Heraclitus he denies
Being, and casts himself into the vortex of Becoming.
He buries the dead God, but God always rises again
the third day. He sees Him with his dimming vision
and mistakes Him for his shadow. In the icy region
of his superb spiritual isolation, his self-worship
glows like a furnace. Dionysus or Christ ? Nay, I —
I am God, he shrieks, till the fires wane, and the
frenzied God becomes a mild madman handed over

u6 VISION AND VESTURE

to the tender human hands of one who shared his
flesh and blood.

Nietzsche's Ufe work was an attempt to trans-
value all values. That is the great need of our time,
and Nietzsche brought the finest gifts towards its
accomplishment. But he omitted some values of
prime importance. We have seen that Nietzsche
gained his first notions of Christianity from Schopen-
hauer, and that Schopenhauer confounded Chris-
tianity with Buddhism, and so conceived of it as
nihilistic. As Nietzche's yea to hfe ascended, he
came more and more to hate Christianity as the
great nay to life, and to see in it a poor version
of the twilight nihilism of Buddhism which had
retained an afterglow of beauty, and was fitting
for a race of decadents. He distinguished between
Christianity and Christ and believed that Christ's
teaching perished with Himself, but he made the
Christ equally responsible for the nay to Ufe. Late
in life he read Tolstoi, and through Tolstoi arrived at
a truer understanding of Christ. Christ had taken
the great Jewish concepts of resurrection, judgment
and life and transmuted them into present experi-
ence. I AM the Resurrection and the Life, The
Kingdom of God is within you The kernel of
Christ's teaching is in the words: I am come that
they might have Hfe, and that they might have it
more abundantly. This in reality makes Christ's
teaching diametrically opposite to Buddha's. Both

NIETZSCHE 117

teachers found pain in existence. Buddha said:
Kill desire that you may get out of the wheel of
existence, and so find peace. Christ said: Live
more abundantly that your pain may vanish in a
fuller life. Buddhism is negative and morbid;
Christianity is positive and vital. Nietzsche saw
something of this late in life, but it was too late to
enter into the warp and woof of his mind. All his
characteristic thoughts of Christ and Christianity
are governed by his early conception. Had he
realised twenty years sooner Christ's teaching that
Eternal Life is a present possession, he would have
seen Christianity in an entirely different light; the
concept eternal life might have gained possession of
his mind; and with its aid his attempt to transvEilue
all values might have been successful. Nietzsche's
vitaUsm plunged him into the sensuous Ufe of
Becoming. Christ's eternal life connects this Ufe
with Being which Nietzsche denied. No one as yet
has S5nithesised Becoming with Being, sensuous
life with spiritual hfe. When this S37nthesis is accom-
plished (Blake came nearest to it!) it will be found
that all Nietzsche's positive values were held in the
hollow of Christ's hand, and can only be conserved
so long as Christ's values hold the paramount place
in men's minds. Without Christ all attempts are
sterile. Nietzsche may insist on the innocence of
voluptuousness, the relativity of morals, the value
of selfishness, pride, and passion — ^in doing so he

ii8 VISION AND VESTURE

redeems hell — ^but if he stops there, these values
will be lost in the bottomless pit. Blake accom-
plished the redemption of hell and more. Starting
with no arbitrary duaUsm of art and religion, on the
contrary, these two things being mystically one in his
own soul, he was able to see hell reaching up to
heaven, and heaven bending down to hell tiU the two
were one, and in his mystic marriage of heaven and
hell made it possible as Nietzsche never could for
us to get the utmost value out of art without
sacrificing one jot of our rehgion.

The inner life of August Strindberg is an interest-
ing commentary on the nineteenth century and its
emergence into the twentieth. Strindberg started
at adolescence as an ardent advocate of pietism
which is well known to us in England as evangeh-
calism. When he surrendered his pietism he did
not like so many of his predecessors pass through a
stage of altruism, but jumped at once to Ibsenism
and became an apostle of the ego. He then set about
with evangeUcal earnestness to shape his ego on a
Nietzschean pattern. He took over with a child-
like spirit the nineteenth-century duahsm of art and
religion and strove to develop the art. It was
not easy to obliterate the sharp moral distinctions
which Christianity had left in his consciousness,
but he did what he could, and was thoroughly dis-
appointed with the results. He then read Kierke-
gaard who had also adopted Goethe's Either .

STRINDBERG 119

or. As religion was the passion of Kierkegaard's
life, he was able to sacrifice art with little com-
punction and to declare for an uncompromising
reUgion. How hard and inhuman that religion was
we all know from Ibsen's Brand. It was not possible
that Strindberg could be satisfied with Kierke-
gaard's version of Chiistianity, and while he
pondered on his Either ... or, he received a happy
flash of inspiration and exclaimed — Both. Kierke-
gaard persistently opposed ethics and aesthetics.
Strindberg after endless struggles " discovered that
work and duty are forms of enjoyment, and that
enjo5mient itself, well used, is a duty." By his union
of the two, he overcame the dualism and surpassed
Nietzsche. Any one following his development here
might have exclaimed " Now we shall have a new
Christ, a new Gospel and a new Church! " Blake
with his understanding of the twenty-seven churches
would have known better. There is not a twenty-
eighth. When you leave the twenty-seventh, having
completed the circle, you must begin again. Strind-
berg to the disappointment, no doubt, of many
friends, looked long at medieval magic, and then
allowed Swedenborg to bring him back to mystical
Christianity.

Swedenborg is valuable when he is not regarded
as the founder of a new church. Many of his thoughts
have passed into the spiritual currency of Europe,
and one cannot forget that he was Blake's first

120 VISION AND VESTURE

teacher; but one must not forget either that Blake
far surpassed him, and that his judgment of him
though severe is just. " This Swedenborg boasts
that what he writes is new, though it is only the
Contents or Index of already published books. He
shows the folly of Churches, and exposes hypocrites,
till he imagines that all are religious, and himself
the single one on earth that ever broke a net. . . .
Swedenborg has not written one new truth. . . .
He has written all the old falsehoods. Any man of
mechanical talents may, from the writings of
Paracelsus or Jacob Boehme, produce ten thousand
volumes of equal value with Swedenborg' s, and from
those of Dante and Shakespeare an infinite number.
But when he has done this, let him not say that he
knows better than his master for he only holds a
candle in sunshine." Finally—" Swedenborg is the
angel sitting at the tomb." It is Blake himself who
leads us away from the tomb which so many sire
wilUng reverently to guard, to a jojrful resurrection
and opened heavens, where we may see, as of old,
angels of God ascending and descending on the Son
of Man,

Thus as one looks back over the course of the
nineteenth century one sees that it was mainly
employed in an arid and thankless task of recovering
lost values. Christianity had guarded heaven, while
it kept hell only for lost souls and earth not at all.
Hence there arose passionate votaries of earth and

STRINDBERG 121

hell who lost sight of heaven. The votaries were
poets, philosophers, naturalists, novelists, dramatists ;
and they all, conscious that the fires of life were
burning in them, were affectedly contemptuous of
heaven, knowing that they could not be lost souls
so long as they stoked and kept the fires ablaze. The
one word which covers their ardent spirit is vitalism,
and it was a vitalism rooted in earth and hell.
Such being the case it is strange that they did not
recognise that Blake confirmed most of their values
in his hell. It is for us to see that by wedding hell
to heaven he while including their values surpassed
them; and we, if we are wise, will go forward where
Blake, and not they, left off, our eyes already
kindled by the wonderful things we shall see.

122 VISION AND VESTURE

CHAPTER XIII

SOME VICTORIANS

Before leaving the nineteenth century let us glance
at some Victorians and see what they contributed
towards modern thought. In the early part of the
century there were mainly two schools of thought
in the EngUsh Church, the High Church which had
become dry and stiff, and the Low Church which was
thedeclining after-glow of the vigorous though narrow
Evangelical movement of the eighteenth century.
Then came the Oxford Movement led by Keble,
Pusey and Newman; and while the choice spirits in
Uterature, poetry and art were yet in the heyday of
youth, the only thing going was Tractarianism which
offered to guide them mentally and spiritually, and
to lead them back into the arms of Holy Mother
Church where they might partake of her Bread and
Wine to satisfy their hunger and thirst.

We can see now that the Oxford Movement has
renewed the entire Enghsh Church, but only by
dying again and again to rise into a fuller life. It
restored the conception of the Holy Catholic Church;
it bound its members together in social sacraments;
it realised that the aesthetic side of man's nature
was redeemed; it insisted on the importance of

SOME VICTORIANS 123

Bishops and Priests, of theology and dogma, of
ritual and form. But while saving for the English
Church this priceless inheritance of the Church of
the first four centuries, it was wholly uncritical in
temper, and insularly blind to the widening vision
which the best European minds had been winning
through much travail and pain of thought during the
last three hundred years. Through this blindness it
lost to the English Church the best and strongest
minds of the nineteenth century. Unfortunately the
leaders of the Oxford Movement had no touch of
genius with the exception of Newman, and he was
lost to the cause.

Newman had personality and genius enough to
compel attention. Every one watched his move-
ments; and when he entered the Roman Catholic
Church, the Roman question was once more thrust
on men's notice in England. Some regarded New-
man's conversion as the despairing surrender of a
mind essentially sceptical. Others remarked on the
gradual sophistication of his mind as it strove to
believe what was aUen to it. His refined and trench-
ant victory in controversy over Kingsley and Glad-
stone was keenly enjoyed. His Apologia was read by
every one and praised for its style. Men waited for
him to utter the word, and there came the wail of a
soul " amid the encircling gloom " crsring to the
" kindly light " that he might take even one step
forward through the darkness of the night. It was

124 VISION AND VESTURE

not known then, as it has become plain to us through
the pages of Wilfrid Ward, that Newman had con-
ceived a great constructive work. Reviewing the
past he had seen that once and again the Catholic
Faith had known how to clothe itself in modes of
thought other than those it had used at its birth.
In the Middle Ages when Catholicism, Judaism and
Islamism were fighting their way through a revived
AristoteUanism, S. Thomas Aquinas had trium-
phantly used the modes of thought supplied by Aris-
totle to embody the Christian Revelation. Newman
believed that he might adapt the Christian Revela-
tion to modern thought without sacrificing one jot of
Catholic tradition, and so accomplish a great service
for his age and his Church. But as decade after
decade passed in the bosom of the Holy Roman
Church, it became reluctantly plain to him that
Rome had no intention whatever of allowing him to
fulfil his dream. She tossed him a Cardinal's Hat in
his old age; but his was the bitterness of one who
had seen the vision and tottered down to the grave
with his vision unachieved.

Among Newman's Usteners when he preached
his memorable sermons at S. Mary's was Matthew
Arnold. Already he had found Oxford religion and
Enghsh thought too strait for him, and looking
across the North Sea he hailed Goethe as a prophet.
Arnold was strongest where the Oxford leaders were
weakest, his critical faculty enabled him easily to

SOME VICTORIANS 125

withstand the glamour of Newman to which so many
young men succumbed. With Goethe as leader he
became the apostle of culture and criticism — culture
that should know the best that had been thought
and said; criticism that should see a thing as it
really is. There was still the need of a religion since
criticism had killed with rapier thrust the notion of
infallibility whether of the Church of Catholicism or
of the Book of Protestantism. Goethe pointed to
Spinoza. Arnold and many others adopted Spinoza
and proclaimed pantheism and self-realisation as the
best that could be done for the time being in the
way of religion. He defined the modern mind as the
imaginative reason which he thought had best been
shown in the old world by Simonides, Pindar,
.(Eschylus and Sophocles, and of which his own
poetry and prose were admirable examples. Yet he
realised fully that he and his contemporaries stood
" between two worlds," and that though the one was
dead, yet the other was " powerless to be bom."

The sea of faith

Was once, too, at the full and round earth's shore

Lay like the folds of a bright girdle furl'd;

But now I only hear

Its melancholy, long, withdrawing roar.

Retreating to the breath

Of the night wind down the vast edges drear

And naked shingles of the world. "^

Arnold believed that the sea of faith would again
he hke the folds of a bright girdle furl'd round the

1 Dover Beach.

126 VISION AND VESTURE

shore of the new earth, but he knew that any attempt
to compel the sea to come in was abortive, and that
he assuredly should not see it in his own time.

Thomas Carlyle even more than Arnold soaked
himself in German, and enthusiastically acknow-
ledged Goethe as his master and teacher. With all
his genius he was a mass of prejudices, deferential
to obscure German authors, and heavily deaf to such
divine singers as SheUey, Keats and Coleridge. His
moral influence was greater than Goethe's, his in-
sight far less sure than the serene Olympian seer's.
With none of the sweetness and light of Arnold, his
pantheistic gospel consisted of intermittent light-
ning, prolonged growhng thunder, and much smoke.

George Eliot was another who passing from under
a narrow and repressive Evangelicalism turned to
Goethe and then to Spinoza for light. She looked at
tractarianism from afar, and pronounced it " like
Jansenism, a recherche form of piety " ; and then
tried like Arnold and Carlyle to build of pantheism
a temple in which to worship. But she could not be
contented with pantheism for long. Her one burning
conviction which she never doubted was that only
that religion was good which deepened human
sympathy. She found that pantheism was not
deepening hers, and that was sufficient for her,
without any further metaphysical justification being
necessary, to abandon pantheism, and to seek else-
where for a religion. George Ehot's criticism of

SOME VICTORIANS 127

pantheism is every bit as much needed now as then.
Pantheism coupled with self-realisation leads to
the worst form of egotism. Granted that self-
reaHsation is the truth which the twentieth century
has grasped, yet it has not yet learned that self-
realisation must be balanced not with a pantheistic
but a transcendent conception of God, for only thus
can a man be saved from the worship of self to the
worship of God.

George EUot turned from Spinoza to Comte as
she found in him the idealisation of human relation-
ships. Compte fostered her human sympathy but
kept her strongly rationalistic. It was not till many
years later when she studied Judaism that she began
to free her imagination from the thraldom of her
reason. Spiritual Judaism had had a wonderful
history especially in the Middle Ages. Jehudah ha
Levi had shown how tradition could be adapted to
the growing light and reason of the time without
being sapped at ther oot. George Eliot henceforth
declared that reason and tradition were the two
lamps of life. Reason, modified by tradition which
kept alive the finest memory of the triumphs of
thought and imagination, gave her the finest hope
for the future. In the symboUsm of Blake Los
was overcoming Urizen. George Eliot like Moses
viewed the promised land from her high mountain,
but she died before she could take possession.

Some of the great Victorian minds sought to retain

128 VISION AND VESTURE

the Christian Spirit with as little dogma as possible.
Chariotte and Emily Bronte took thankfully what
food Maurice could give them out of his christened
platonism. Tennyson and Charies Kingsley were
glad to receive of the same. Ruskin drew of himself
and the Bible what he needed. Browning, reaUsing,
perhaps, more than these the decomposing action of
criticism, yet believed that the Christ-Face would
grow.

That one Face, far from vanish, rather grows.

Or decomposes but to recompose.

Become my universe that feels and knows.^

Carlyle, George Eliot and Matthew Arnold had
Goethe for Godfather in the new faith before they
finally diverged. George EUot retained least of him,
Carlyle worshipped him most devoutly but never
saw his idol quite as he was; and Arnold assimilated
both the pantheistic and pagan sides of his teacher.

Goethe's was the first great European influence
of the nineteenth century, and after his was
Schopenhauer's which at once reflected itself in
Uterature. Schopenhauer's pessimism was Buddhism
stripped of its picturesque oriental setting, and
dressed in the sad weeds of a bereaved widow.
Pessimism destroys the " sweet illusions " of life,
revealing them as " effects of colour that we know
to be made up of tinsel, broken glass, and rags." ^
Christianity had ever been willing that illusions

' Epilogue. » The Lifted Veil.

SOME VICTORIANS 129

should be pricked, believing that they were the
shadows that proved the substance truth. Schopen-
hauer and Leopardi regarded truth as the last
illusion which made it possible for man to drag on
his existence. Schopenhauer's influence worked like
leaven in Tolstoi's mind, and in England this leaven
informs from end to end the novels of Thomas
Hardy. At first one might rashly conclude that there
is nothing but the ache of modernism in The Return
of the Native or Jude the Obscure ; in reality Hardy
has accomplished the magical work of viewing life
from the tragic point of view, and seeing it of an
infinite sad loveliness. He has baptised it in the wine
of his imagination till one would think the sadness
must dissolve into joy. He has not redeemed tragedy
like Nietzsche: he has composed the theme in the
minor key in the s3miphony of modern thought pre-
paratory to the joyous outburst of the wedding
march at the nuptials of Heaven and Hell.

George Meredith was another novelist of finest
imagination. From him came the full flower of
Goethe's revived paganism. Paganism aimed at
the perfection of the natural man. For it there was
no dualism of body and soul such as a monkish
Christianity exaggerated at a later date; and there-
fore it could see the flower of a spiritual life growing
out of the natural man just as it saw a lily growing
out of the soil. Meredith accepted and worshipped
the soil. Earth was mother, renewer, sweetener.

I

I30 VISION AND VESTURE

The tendency of Christianity has been to despise
earth.

Each moment draw from earth away
My heart that lowly waits Thy call. ^

It has produced an other-worldly spirituality
with poor thin sap in its veins. George Eliot had
reacted against this other - worldly egotism and
returned to mother-earth; but it was Meredith who
wrote and sang of the paramount importance of
earth in reUgion, finding in it his prime inspiration.
He did not, hke so many pagans, stop short of
sensualism, — the senses were a stage to the spirit.
" The spirit must brand the flesh, that it may live," ^
for " all life is a lesson that we live to enjoy but in
the spirit." 2 The flower of the spirit is Love which
" signifies a new start in our existence, a finer shoot
of the tree stoutly planted in good gross earth; the
senses running their hve sap, and the minds com-
panioned and the spirits made one by the whole-
natured conjunction." ^ The guardian of this
healthy growth is intelligence, which detects un-
erringly sentimentaUsm — " the pinnacle flame-
spire of sensualism; " ^ which will not be mastered
by appearances; which does not " like veterans in
their armchairs strip the bloom of life by giving its
sensations in the present; " ^ but which " casts an
oblique hght " * on men; on " whatever is out of

' Tersteegen. ' Diana of the Crossways.

' Rhoda Fleming. * The Comic Spirit.

SOME VICTORIANS 131

proportion, overblown, affected, pretentious, bom-
bastical, hypocritical, pedantic, fantastically deli-
cate; whenever it sees them self-deceived or hood-
winked, given to run in idolatries, drifting into
vanities, congregating in absurdities, planning
short-sightedly, plotting dementedly, whenever they
are at variance with their professions, and violate
the unwritten but perceptible laws binding them in
consideration one to another; whenever they offend
sound reason, fair justice; are false in humility or
mined with conceit, individually or in the bulk; "
and looking " humanely malign " on these foUows
" by volleys of silvery laughter. That is the Comic
Spirit." Meredith's Comic Spirit is the finest,
subtlest, and most spiritual product of Mother Earth,
It is cleansing and healing; it is earth's sword by
which earthiness is overcome; it robs tragedy and
death of their sting and opens the gates of heaven;
it is the eternal sweet laughter and sanity of God.

Swinburne was another who sought to restore
pagan ideals. His ruhng passions were a love of the
beautiful and a desire for liberty. He, Meredith,
and Hardy were later in date than Carlyle, Arnold,
and George Eliot, and so further removed from the
pietism on which they had been nourished and which
coloured their minds to the end. Still they accus-
tomed the minds of their younger brethren to liberty
of thought ; and Swinburne was quick to catch the
infection and to strike for liberty of body as well as

132 VISION AND VESTURE

liberty of mind. Meredith reacted against other-
worldliness in his love for Mother Earth; and it
was through his feeling for Earth that he approached
and assimilated paganism. Swinburne reacted
against a distorted view bi the sexual instinct and
perceived that the Greeks held what he was cr57ing
for. He was stimulated by modern examples as
well as by ancient. As he looked across the Channel
and inhaled the fragrance of Baudelaire's Fleurs du
Mai it seemed to him that Baudelaire was sexually
innocent to a degree impossible of attainment in
England. It is for expert critics to decide whether
Baudelaire's or Sappho's influence is strongest in
the Poems and Ballads.

The pagan ideal is the perfection of the natural
man. That meant much more than is apparent to
modern ears for which natural is the exact reverse of
spiritual. For the pagan who conceived of body and
soul as one, the natural included the spiritual which
was its fine essence. The pagan trusted his instincts,
regarded his senses as instructors, aimed at harmony,
and worshipped earth. His body was delicately
responsive to the earth in all its transitions, to the
seasons in all their moods. It was a musical instru-
ment with many strings so that the pagan could
pass easily from wistful sadness to Ught-hearted
gaiety, and rejoice because life had its minor as
well as its major key.

Christianity preached the foolishness of the

SOME VICTORIANS 133

Cross to the Greek. The beautiful natural man
must be born again. The Greek, though he could
show a beautiful spirituality as the outcome of
all his efforts, had carried the development of the
natural man to the brink of deplorable degeneracy.
Christianity, recognising the spiritual product, spoke
to it, wooed it and begot on it a new man, a new
creation, a new ideal — the ideal of the divine
humanity. Once the pagan awoke to the Christian
consciousness, there was no going back, he was
marred for the pagan Ufe. If he stood still he was a
scarecrow of humanity; and there was no alterna-
tive but to press forward to the realisation of the
new ideal. The fully-christened pagan knew that
nothing had been lost of his former paganism. When
he had yielded himself to the Christ-Spirit, the new
life in him seized hold of all that it found, and trans-
muted it into the sweet blood of the new spiritual
man. Christianity rescued him from the precipice
of degeneracy and started him on a new beginning
with infinite possibilities for the future.

Swinburne in his attempt to revive paganism
presented the strange anomaly of a half-christened
consciousness trying to forget and go back, instead
of pushing forward to a complete consciousness which
should include the pagan values. To go back is im-
possible. A whole pagan was a beautiful thing. A
whole Christian is a beautiful thing, but all the
intermediate stages in the painful transition from

134 VISION AND VESTURE

one to the other are not beautiful save to prophetic
eyes. Swinburne moving among Victorian half-bakes
bewailed the " grey breath of the Galilean," not
realizing that when the Galilean's breath accom-
phshes a complete work there is cause for nothing
but rejoicing.

Swinburne rebelled against the notion that the
sexual instincts were unholy. His reaction carried
him far into ancient Greece. There is no more
thorny and complex subject for us than sex: to
the Greeks it was simple. Swinburne attempted to
treat it again with pagan simplicity. For this great
purpose he was equipped with two necessary quali-
fications, freedom of mind, and a quick unerring
sense for the beautiful. If the subject is to be
touched at all, the only thing that matters is how
it is touched. Swinburne tracked it fearlessly
along its broad streams and its side streams, in
normal types and intermediate types, and in such
poems as Dolores, Faustine, Anactoria, Erotion and
Hermaphroditus showed that forms of lust which
are filthy in filthy minds, repelUng in scientific
hand-books, were beautiful when treated by the
glowing imagination of a poet who was determined
to see nothing unclean in the pulse of Ufe itself.

Swinburne's Poems and Ballads showed that he
had plumbed the depths and scaled the heights of
sex, and understood everything. In Dolores is seen
the infinite pain that throbs at the heart of a

SOME VICTORIANS 135

voluptuous life. In Hermaphroditus he lifts for a
moment the veil which binds the " strong desire "
and " great despair " which gnaw at the heart of the
sexual invert. Out of the whirlpool of lust he seizes
and brandishes those terrible symbols of ^ex —
blood and the whip. Those who rashly plunge into
the whirlpool find themselves quickly sucked down
into the bottomless pit where they sink deeper and
deeper as they make despairing efforts to strike a
foothold. These are the depths. Yet Swinburne's
all-seeing eye has searched the heights. The colour,
the music, the song, the guilelessness, rapture and
bliss are there also; and as he leads us upwards on
passionate eagle wing, he soars to the point of light
where sex has become religion, and the pang of the
harlot the rapture of the saint.

One cannot leave Swinburne's treatment of sex
without a glance at Walt Whitman. Both men were
brought up by the side of the sea, and something of
the liberty of the sea infected their spirits. Whitman
even more than Swinburne lived in the open; and
his long tramps when he was sixteen passed into the
pulse of his rhythm, and the fresh open air of his
songs. Like Blake and like Nietzsche, he accepted life
passionately, and his yea to Hfe led him to the freest
treatment of sex as he sang of the " body electric."
Swinburne admired Whitman's freedom; but his
criticism that Whitman was lacking in chivalrous
feeling towards woman will appear just to most

136 VISION AND VESTURE

men, and to such the fire that burns in Calamus must
seem unhallowed. Whitman and Swinburne were
both reactionaries, for which they must not be
blamed. They had as much right to recover some
pagan values as the Oxford Movement some Church
values of the first four centuries of Christendom.

They went back in order to go forward. Having
rescued a clean and sane conception of sex, it is for
us to offer their gleanings from pagan fields on
the Christian Altar, that a pure flame may ascend
to heaven from the holocaust of their earth-bom
fruits.

When we turn from Swinburne's poetry to his
prose, there is the difference as between the ex-
quisite movements of a classical dancer in undress
to her overdress among her fellows.

Swinburne's unstinting admiration is in pleasing
contrast to Carlyle's surly treatment of his contem-
poraries, though he has the Victorian way of writing
of them as though he were writing their epitaphs.
His abounding praise or dispraise of an author or
poet was not the true measure of their value, but of
the impulsive predilections of a creature all compact
of imagination and fire, of an artist who distributed
his Kght and shade with an eye to the ultimate
effect of his picture. One sees him at one moment
vigorously waving his cap to such immortals as
Victor Hugo, Emily Bronte, Shelley, Coleridge and
Keats, the next moment shaking hands with

SOME VICTORIANS 137

Charles Reade, and then affectionately patting
Anthony TroUope on the head. Always there is the
revelation of a creature of many and varied human
sjnnpathies. George Eliot insisted that the only test
of spiritual progress was a growing sympathy for
individual men and women in their joys and
sorrows. Such being the case it becomes a pressing
question whether the man of imagination does not
far outstrip the man of religion. Cardinal Newman
had fine imaginative instincts, but he never trusted
them far, and his sympathies became as narrow
and intense as an old maid's. His religious imposi-
tions forbade him to hold fellowship with any but
restricted co-religionists. Swinburne was boundless
in his sympathies. His imagination unfettered
understood and embraced every kind of woman
from Sappho to Christina Rosetti, and every kind of
man from Ezekiel to Gautier. Swinburne could
have taken to his bosom the author of the Dream of
Gerontius : the Cardinal would have washed himself
and his clothes in holy water after such a defiling
contact. Love is the final fruit of religion, a love
that overflows and embraces all irrespective of
creed and morals. Religion without imagination
can never reach this goal, but soon turned aside
degenerates into a loveless spirit hopelessly bhnd
to true human values.

To Swinburne is due the honour of appraising
Blake at something like his true value in a century

138 VISION AND VESTURE

when it was the custom among savants to patronise
him after a reading of the Songs of Innocence and
an undiscerning glance at the Prophetic Books.
No prominent religious teacher recognised Blake.
Swinburne, the creature of impulse, instinct, passion,
and imagination read Blake's secret where un-
imaginative religionists must have failed. We have
seen that Blake built up the whole of his system on
the doctrine of the new birth. The Real Man im-
veiled by the new birth was a mystic-artist and
therefore could be approached by the mystic or the
artist. Swinburne was so entirely the poet of the
senses that we do not expect to find. traces of the
mystic in him. He had only the vaguest idea as to
what the new birth meant except as it freed the
imagination, and therefore he was not able to
follow far Blake's religious teaching or mystical
flights. A pure pagan would have been turned back
at the threshold; that Swinburne penetrated so far
is due to the fact that there was in his conscious-
ness, deeper than his pagan s3Tiipathies, an im-
movable Christian deposit. The marvellous thing
is that all that he really cared for, and much of
which was condemned by his contemporaries, was
contained and justified in Blake's Gospel. His
passionate love of children revelled in the Songs
of Innocence and Experience; his apprehension of
the value of instinct, impulse, passion, disobedience,
rebellion, revolt, was anticipated in the Proverbs of

SOME VICTORIANS 139

Hell; and with his fiery imagination he caught
much of the meaning of Blake's most difficult poem
Jerusalem. We might have concluded that he gauged
all that was possible, were it not that to-day, Ellis
and Yeats, and Archibald Russell, have penetrated
a great deal farther into its inmost meaning. Swin-
burne struck for many freedoms, most of all for the
freedom of the body; this he found more than
justified. It was proclaimed consistently throughout
Blake's works that whatsoever lives is holy, that
desire is holy and necessary. Swinburne, who had
concluded that such a view of sex could only be held
by a pagan, insisted that Blake was neither a
Christian nor an infidel, that he was persistently and
irretrievably a heretic. " He that is spiritual dis-
cerneth all things," wrote S. Paul. If 'this is true,
the spiritual must include the imaginative. When
the religious man pushes on to a full spiritual
consciousness, and the imaginative man to a full
imagination, then these two will become one, and
discern all things in heaven and hell. That Swin-
burne discerned all things in Blake's hell and failed
to discern all things in his heaven, is evidence of the
hmitations of the pagan consciousness which he had
so zealously fostered.

To many paganism is the antithesis of Christianity.
That is a fallacy. Paganism and Christianity hold
in common the great doctrine of immanence, and
our neo-pagans have grasped its full significance.

I40 VISION AND VESTURE

Jesus Christ whose master-phrase was " the
Kingdom of Heaven " spoke of it as immanent in
His early ministry. " The Kingdom of God is
within you." In His closing ministry He presented
it in the transcendent aspect. " Verily I say unto
you, that there be some of them that stand here,
which shall not taste of death, till they have seen
the Kingdom of God come with power." These two
conceptions, immanence and transcendence, stand
sharply side by side in Christ's mind. The Greek
Fathers of the Church seized the immanence and
the Latin Fathers the transcendence. Paganism
filtered into the Church through the Greek Fathers.
Already in the Gospel according to S. John, Christi-
anity had encountered Greek thought in Ephesus
and christened it in its prologue. In the second
century Justin Martyr when he became a Christian
could not forget that he had been nurtured by the
teaching of Socrates and Plato. Anxious for his
beloved teachers lest they should have no part in
the Christian salvation, he pondered till the sublime
opening verses of S. John's Gospel explained to him
that they, too, were partially illuminated by " the
Light that lighteth every man that cometh into the
world." By the end of the fourth century Plato's
rich treasury had passed into the veins of the
Christian Church. Then began a further process of
assimilation. Aristotle's name became paramount
in Europe. The Christian Schoolmen fell upon him,

SOME VICTORIANS 141

and S. Anselm and S. Thomas Aquinas seized and
preserved for the Church all that seemed to them
of value in the pagan philosopher.

The Latin Church with its traditions of empire,
law, organisation, took over such pagan virtues as
fortitude and patriotism, but for the most part
developed the Christian doctrine of transcendence,
making much of sovereignty, law and retribution,
while the Greek Fathers were proclaiming father-
hood, love and forgiveness.

A full Christianity must combine both. Our
nineteenth-century thinkers carried immanence to
the creation of man: Nietzsche to superman, till
his head was lost in the clouds. Swinburne, hke
Shelley, scornful of Christianity, worshipful of
Christ, regarded Man as earth's topmost blossom,
scaling the sky because of the God that was in him.
Leaving the Greek Gods for Hertha, the Teutonic
Goddess of Earth, he sang :

One birth of my bosom !

One beam of mine eye;
One topmost blossom

That scales the sky;
Man, equal and one with me, man that is made of me,
man that is I.

That is the skiey height touched by our modern
free-thinkers. There was one warning voice. George
Ehot had ample opportunity of watching the effects
of pantheism on those who embraced it ardently,
and on herself while she sought in it for a religion.

142 VISION AND VESTURE

It is an attempt to look at the universe apart from
our relationship to it as human beings. " We must
love and hate, — love what is good for mankind, hate
what is evil for mankind." It begins by spiritualis-
ing man, and promising to enlarge his horizon, it
ends by sapping his manhood and robbing him of
God. The criticism is needed as much as ever. It
is wearisome that man will not learn by the past.
In every generation there is a waste of precious time
and more precious thought while men are learning
by slow and painful experience the truth which
should be their starting point. In vain the Church
protests. Christian Science rushes into Akosmism,
George Tyrell into Jesuitism, Newman into Papism,
Swinburne into Paganism, and almost all into a
one-side Immanentism. There can be no further
progress till our teachers recover the old Christian
doctrine of transcendence, and then reach forward
out of themselves to accomplish the work of God in
the world.

BERNARD SHAW 143

CHAPTER XIV

BERNARD SHAW

Bernard Shaw is the spirit of Industrial Revolution
of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries become
incarnate. He stands where the nineteenth century
merges into the twentieth, and faces both ways. He
interprets the sociaKstic aspirations of the past by
the latest philosophies of Germany and France.
Like all truly religious people he looks forward to
the future, but in his look forward his imagination is
overweighted by the shackles forged in the mid-
Victorian period which he yet so constantly derides.
The superman must combine all the qualities of
the imaginative mystic and the earth-born positivist.
He has not yet come. Yeats is an enchanting
imaginative mystic who occasionally touches earth
with the dairity step of the Sidhe, but is fearful lest
the brightness of his imagination should be tarnished.
Bernard Shaw is a breezy child of earth who occa-
sionally touches the Emp3n:ean, but who quickly
flutters down lest his melting wings should cause him
to drop to the derision of the Gods. Like Yeats he
is an Irishman, and like all Irishmen, who do not
live in Ireland, he is distinguished for his clean
intellect. While Englishmen, terrified at their

144 VISION AND VESTURE

thoughts at last send them out well wadded into the
world, a word from Oscar Wilde or Bernard Shaw
cuts through the wadding like a sharp sword; and
men dazzled by the brightness of the steel mis-read
the word and are sure that it does not mean what it
says. That is why there are so many Bernard Shaws,
while the real Bernard Shaw lives in obscurity.
According to report he is an egotist, a braggart and
a buffoon; a heartless intellectual, a scoffer and a
blasphemer. He sits like Mephistopheles with his
head in his big scarlet sleeve, and laughs at the
victims he has hoodwinked and lampooned. How
could it be otherwise when this brilliant man is — so
they say — an atheist!

The real Bernard Shaw, obscured by his glitter,
is a humble man of faith, simple, forceful, direct,
of clearest eagle vision for this world and its affairs,
and with fitful glimpses of heaven. Jonathan Swift,
dreading h3T)ocrisy, pretended to vices that were
not his; Bernard Shaw, frightened at his humility,
pretends to an immense pride and superiority in
which his humble self may be sheltered from the
cold blast. Like all really humble men he acknow-
ledges readily his debts. He meekly confesses what
he has learned from Bunyan and Hogarth, from
Schopenhauer, Nietzsche and Samuel Butler, from
Ibsen and Tolstoi, and from Blake.

Bernard Shaw sees instinctively the effect of our
social system on all sorts and conditions of men.

BERNARD SHAW 145

He has that most dreadful thing — a single eye, and
he permits no romanticisms, sentimentalisms and
idealisms to throw dust in it. Thus Tolstoi's terrible
indictment of the state is inevitably endorsed by
Shaw. It is in the remedy that he differs from
Tolstoi. The Russian when fifty years old began a
serious study of the Gospel. The Sermon on the
Mount captivated him, and he read it in a way
quite unapproved of by the Greek Church, but ap-
proved of by the doukhoborski and other quaker-like
sects of Russia. His reading convinced him that
Christ's central doctrine was non-resistance to evil.
It was clear that such a doctrine practised would
usher in a Kingdom of Heaven very different from
the kingdoms of this world which stand by their
armies and navies, that is, by force. Therefore
states, since they can only stand by violence, are
anti-Christian at their foundation. Tolstoi', unable
to defend any kind of state, declared without com-
promise for anarchy, but it was an anarchy rendered
perfectly harmless, as it was deprived of its bombs
and shells by the application of the principle of non-
resistance. In England Shaw has had the oppor-
tunity of studying the effect of Tolstoi's teaching
in the settlements at Purleigh and Stroud.

Shaw's reading of the Gospel has doubtlessly been
deeply affected by Tolstoi, but he does not apply it
to the destruction of the state. He is convinced
that anarchy is rendered impracticable by the law of

146 VISION AND VESTURE

-rent, and that it would depend on an unselfish-
ness in human nature which is the exception rather
than the rule. Well instructed in the principle of
evolution as interpreted by Samuel Butler and
Bergson, he believes in the orderly development of
the social organism, and that the immediate phase
to which it is tending is a social democratic state,
the transition to which will be effected by the exten-
sion of municipal trading to all such social services as
have become sufficiently highly organised to be ripe
for public management, and sufficiently dependent
on general consumption to make it an obvious
advantage to the community to run them for its
own benefit, rather than for a set of shareholders
for whom profits and dividends take the first place.
This socialised State, of course, cannot be final, but
a necessary stage to a higher mode of government.
Herbert Spencer and Comte had beheved in the
evolution of the social organism; but they put a
heavy drag on the evolution by their doctrine of
obedience to the state. The state only evolves in
proportion as its human units believe that duty to
self is the first requirement. Duty to self may involve
disobedience to the state. Progress is effected by
the law-breakers, but the fruitful law-breakers are
not lawless, as obedience to a higher law consecrates
their rebellion. Shaw has learnt that the mystical
life process, called evolution, is now working along
the higher development of the self, and that if men

BERNARD SHAW 147

are to keep proper respect for this self, it can only
be by working for a better social order than that in
which they find themselves. For in the present order
no one escapes. The money of the generous young
man is tainted equally with that which maintains
widowers' houses. Mrs. Warren and her friends on
the street have been driven by a pressure far
stronger than their passions. The present system
shows no way out of the Doctor's Dilemma. And
so with soldiers and' ill-assorted couples, with the
Devil's Disciple and Blanco Posnet, professional
men and officials, clerks and artisans, playwrights
and artists, Fanny with her first play, and children
with their rights, rich spinsters and curates, as all
are victims of the state, then they can only keep
their self-respect by working for a new order where
they shall not be victims that go under, but victors
who overcome, and thus prepare the way for super-
men who shall be able to grapple effectually with
each difficulty as it arises, and in their turn lead the
way to a golden morrow. For man cannot save his
soul until the soul of the community in which he
lives is saved also.

Bernard Shaw is no respecter of persons. His eye
penetrates every corner in high life and low life like
Hogarth's. Like Hogarth he does not blind his eyes
by looking at the sun, but with hilarious good
humour he tears away all official trappings and
garments till the human animal stands in all his

148 VISION AND VESTURE

ugly nakedness. Hogarth's realism forced him to
paint ugly people; but nothing daunted, he made
the beauty of his pictures depend on the fitness with
which his wavy lines expressed his exuberant
vitality. Bernard Shaw's realism has also compelled
him to discard conventional effects, and the final
impression of beauty which his plays leave results
from the rude vitality of those of his characters who
are real enough to burst the trammels of convention.
These living people are always opposed by the
respectable moralists in the play, and therefore
Shaw in his burning zeal for a new morality cannot
bear those who prate of the old morality as if it
were the eternal law of righteousness.

Like Bunyan, Shaw sees that morals are snatched-
up rags by which men try to cover their nakedness.
Bunyan regarded the merely moral man as dead in
trespasses and sins, feeling an instinctive dislike to
him which was sound, and he explained his instinct
by the great protestant principle that a man is
saved by faith and not by works. This doctrine in
Bunyan's keeping was quite safe, but when seized
by the puritan rabble, it was interpreted so as to
send the best people to hell, and to fill heaven with
a disagreeable band of pusillanimous psalm-singers.
So much have the tables been turned, that Shaw
needed the Devil's Disciple to cut through this
rabble, and restore heaven's reputation. Shaw's
doctrine at bottom is the same as Bunyan's. The

BERNARD SHAW 149

converted tinker, when he had battled through the
dark night of his soul, knew that he had passed from
death into life. This new life compelled him to new
deeds, and he was convinced that these new deeds
were vitally diiferent from the moral deeds of the
unconverted man. Shaw too is conscious of being
alive, and so he has been obliged to conserve
the simple evangelical distinction between " dead
works " and " living works." He has always
declared for the " living works," and in conse-
quence has put himself in antagonism with those
whose morals are the sapless copies of dead values.
Bunyan's pubHc life of protest required the fine
courage of a warrior. Shaw's protest is equally fine
and courageous, and he has only escaped Bedford or
HoUoway Gaol because men do not believe he means
what he says, or they have grown more indifferent
than their forefathers of the seventeenth century.

Shaw's realism has made him a competent inter-
preter of Ibsen. Chesterton, whose name depends
on his differing from Shaw, though he often says
provokingly true things, claims to know the whole
map of Shaw's mind and to understand him where
others fail. The boast is idle, for Chesterton has no
understanding of Ibsen, or of those parts of Shaw
which he has learned from Ibsen.

Ibsen began under the cloud of Darwinism. He
emerged only when he had learnt to affirm the self.
Self-realisation alone can free man from being a

ISO VISION AND VESTURE

slave-puppet, and woman also, changing the doll in
the house into a self-respecting woman for whom
there is an unknown future. What suffocated men
and women alike were the ideals they clung to. The
main battle of Ibsen's life was between realism and
idealism. Chesterton takes these words and uses
them in a different sense from Ibsen's, and then
proceeds boisterously to knock down both Ibsen
and Shaw. It is obvious that men have an ideal way
of thinking and speaking of marriage and war, life
and death, which is simply unreal. Ibsen sweeps
away all these ideal cobwebs, leaving men reali-
ties to grapple with. Just here Bernard Shaw is
thoroughly Ibsenish. No doubt he sweeps away
a great deal besides cobwebs — ornaments and
flowers and household gods, and when his house
is empty, swept and garnished, it reeks of sanitas
rather than sweet lavender.

It is not clear, though Shaw has written hundreds
of pages of preface, whether he identifies with God
the life-force which is his constant theme. I think
he knows no other God, and that is the grave defect
in his philosophy, for it can only end in identif3dng
George Bernard Shaw with God and himself be-
coming the object of his worship. God is not the
life-force, and therefore the man, who is conscious
of the life-force coming in like a flood, rather, the
man who is a life-force can either insist on himself
to the denial of God, or he can offer himself to God,

BERNARD SHAW 151

and find himself. The oblation of self to God is the
one sublime romantic act out of which all romance
grows. Shaw has included romance with the false
ideals which must go. He has not been fair to him-
self, nor has he quite succeeded in explaining himself
just as the Wagner of the letters and the real Wagner
were not coincident. If Shaw has confused the
life-force with God, he has not identified it with
himself. Actually he has given himself to its onward
sweep and so has largely won possession of his soul.
That is why there is so much fine romanticism in
him, and he can draw such an admirably romantic
character as Tom Keegan in John Bull's Other Island.
Shaw's real protest is against sentimentalism,
for he is as convinced as George Meredith that it
has its origin in the senses, and that sentimental
ideals must be reckoned among the false values.
His doctrine leaves a real idealism untouched. For
as supernaturalism is to be found not outside
nature but in the heart of nature, so idealism is not
outside reality, but the very stuff of reality itself.

Shaw's faith in the life-force at once relates him to
Nietzsche and superman. But one must insist' that
the Shavian superman is very different from the
Nietzschean. The two might be taken for twins in
their nonage. Both have struggled clear of Darwin.
Both are intent on a higher organisation of the
mysterious life-force. Both again are related to the
Saint. The Nietzschean is the first to part with the

152 VISION AND VESTURE

Saint, as he cannot believe in any one's election
but his own, and himself is self-elect. That is the
beginning of his isolation and disdain. The Shavian
like the Saint cannot beheve in any one's reproba-
tion. He is sure that there are tens of thousand
wage-slaves of the capitalist system who could rise
to great things, could a superman be found to break
their fetters. He only cares to be a superman that
he may cry almost in the language of the Saint:
" Behold, I and the children whom the Lord hath
given me." It is his concern for his brethren that
keeps him with a human heart. As the Nietzschean
becomes more and more inhuman and mad, the
Shavian becomes more and more human and sane.
The Shavian, losing sight of the Nietzschean, can
still keep pace a while with the Saint. But the Saint
has a longing desire for worship. He yearns to pre-
sent himself and his children to the Lord and to fall
down in speechless worship. The Shavian would like
to worship but is confused as to the object. He
raises his columns higher and higher until his towers
reach unto heaven, but he can find no capitals for his
columns, no roof to his towers. He will see that his
brother the Saint has at last built a Temple in which
many can worship, and his face is transfigured as
he adores; but for those who look on it will become
clear that with his infinite toil he himself has
only raised another Babel. And when the mighty
building rocks and he rushes out into the gathering

BERNARD SHAW 153

darkness, one can but hope he will meet the Saint
who will assuredly take him by the hand, and gently
drawing him into his Temple present him to the Lord.
Shaw's superman owes much of his sanity to
Blake. To trace all Blake's influence in Shaw would
be to repeat what was said in the chapter on
Nietzsche. A text could be found for any one of
Shaw's plays in the Proverbs of Hell. The Prome-
thean legend has been tinged by Blake before being
taken up by Shaw. Shaw is equally with Yeats the
offspring of Heaven and Hell, but whereas Yeats
takes after the father, Shaw is his mother's child.
Perhaps more than all else Shaw has learned from
Blake the value of passion. He takes the word in
its widest significance, and finds it the propelling
power of the life-force. Passion includes sex, and
much more. There is a passion for truth, a passion
for justice, a passion for social equity. There is a
red-hot passion for humanity, besides which all
other passions pale. This passion is of such price-
less value that it must not be restrained. " Sooner
murder an infant in its cradle than nurse unacted
desires." Man's business is first to find out what he
really wants. That is not always easy. Some only
learn after they have shocked all their kith and kin,
and have even been to prison. These come to the
palace of wisdom by the road of excess. Others
need to retire to the wilderness, and when they have
been tempted forty days, they learn what they

154 VISION AND VESTURE

must do. Others, again, just let themselves go.
Instead of finding it easy to be splendidly wicked,
they are driven to unsuspected heights of heroism.
It is more difficult to become a Caesar Borgia than
a Francis of Assisi. When a man knows what he
wants, let him act. " He who desires but acts not,
breeds pestilence." Thousands are poisoned by
their unacted desires: all life, to them, takes on a
jaundiced hue. Let them be pushed into the open,
even if they stumble at every step. Let them be
rolled on a dung-heap that they may hck them-
selves clean. Blessed is he who has his own clear
instincts to guide him. " No bird soars too high if
he soars with his own wings." Let not a man copy
another. " The eagle never lost so much time as
when he submitted to learn of the crow." Finally,
" One law for the Lion and Ox is oppression," there-
fore let a man discover the law of his own life — let
him find the Real Self — and having found it, keep
it, for he has learned the secret of life, and it will
carry him to the heights if he is not turned back by
the opposition he has aroused.

Shaw's own passion is for social equity. Here, too,
Blake has uttered the great word. " Prisons are
built with stones of Law, Brothels with bricks of
Religion." Blake realised the implications of his
religion of life with unerring instinct, though he did
not work them out in detail. He speaks the Word of
God to his spiritual children, and leaves it to them

BERNARD SHAW 155

to interpret its meaning. Bernard Shaw, though he
has not assimilated the heavenly side of Blake's
teaching, has seized the social, and has worked it
out with a consistent clearness which has proved
invaluable to his conception of superman, for it has
kept him human with his legs firmly planted on
mother-earth.

Shaw has learned from other teachers — from
Shelley and Goethe, and Wagner, and Morris, but
we must not forget that he has a fine original mind
of his own, and that driven by his passion for
righteousness it has accomplished great things.
The great attempt of Nietzsche's life was to trans-
value all values. No one, now, can claim that he
succeeded. At any rate he showed the necessity.
It will require a catholic to transvalue catholic
values, and he will " fill up that which is behind of
the afflictions of Christ." Shaw is a protestant of
protestants. He is not alone, and his afflictions are
proportionately less. Whatever his sufferings he has
too much of the gaiety of genius to let them spoil his
happiness. Here and there he overlooks a protestant
value of the past, but he has succeeded in trans-
valuing many of the values that protestantism has
stood for, and what he contributes to superman's
make-up is so sound that when he is come, he will
be vigorous, sane and human, and able to keep
himself intellectually and morally clean by his
spirit of ringing laughter.

IS6 VISION AND VESTURE

CHAPTER XV

W. B. YEATS

W. B. Yeats is the fair offspring of Blake's marriage
of Heaven and Hell. He combines in himself the
two streams which in the nineteenth century ran
widely apart. He is the earnest of a completer type
than himself. For though he has gained a wider
and freer outlook than the Victorians, and his work
is more beautiful, he yet lacks their robustness, deep
humanity and freedom from pose.

The Victorians were before all else rationaHsts.
Matthew Arnold's fine definition of the modem
mind as " imaginative reason," in the light of
Blake's four Zoas, exactly places the nineteenth
century at its best. Urizen is reason and Los is
imagination. Urizen and Los cannot dwell together
unless Los is supreme. In the Victorians Urizen
was supreme, and their fine imaginations were being
continually overhauled and paralysed by the dire
grip of their reason. Herbert Spencer, John Stuart
Mill, and Charles Darwin, were sons of Urizen; but
Urizen's finest offspring was a woman, and George
Eliot is the most perfect example of Victorian
rationalistic utilitarianism. Rationalism ever en-
forces a utiUtarian view of life and religion.

The best Victorians had deep human feeling, but

W. B. YEATS 157

strong as it was, it clashed with their utiUtarianism
and there broke down. The man who proved useless
to the state or social organism became the object
of the wrath and denunciation of the man who
nursed his indignation as the sap of his moral life.
No one ever lived with more manifold power of
human sympathy than George Eliot, and no one was
ever more scornful than she at the sight of pure
selfishness. While she can forgive almost all her
characters, yet Tito, Rosamond and Grandcourt
appear to have been created on purpose to preserve
her moral self-respect.

Rationalism, Utilitarianism, and Altruism were
the positive Trinity that were to take the place of
the Christian mystical Trinity. But while the
Christian dogmas were being quietly shelved, the
Christian morals were maintained, after a little
trimming, and were to be put entirely at the service
of one's neighbour. We have already seen how
altruism was a stage to Ibsen and Nietzsche with
their assertion of the ego, and that Nietzsche's
doctrine of duty to self brings us back to Blake
whose Real Self was unveiled by the old Christian
process of regeneration.

Whether we like or dislike the nineteenth-century
spirit, its advent was inevitable. Idealists had been
accustomed for so long a time to affirm the inner
and deny the outer realities, that the affirmation of
the positive values, even if the mystical values

158 VISION AND VESTURE

vanished altogether, was forced out of man at a time
when science was striding forward. Just as Goethe
had said, Either rehgion or art, so they said. Either
the Kingdom of Heaven or the earth, was the one
reahty. Strindberg resolved the first dilemma by
saying. Both — which was Blake's solution ; and
Eucken has declared for the reality of both the
inner world of Being, and the sensuous world of
Becoming, and he sees man as the meeting ground
of various grades of Reality. Our finest thinkers
have rejected rationalism and its brood, and show
clear signs of a renascence of mysticism. Thus we
have started the twentieth century with a strong
conviction that there must be a union of positivism
and mysticism, for only so can we come to a sane
and vigorous outlook on life which is at once
spiritual and natural.

Yeats has hardly the positivism, but he has the
mysticism, and mysticism which recognises the
imagination as the supreme faculty. It is this which
shows him to be Blake's spiritual child. There are
over a score of definitions of mysticism. Here I use
the word to express that direct vision of the truth
which some few people possess. As we saw in an
earlier chapter the mystic is compelled to imagina-
tive expression of what he sees, or he must remain
silent. Yeats is an Irishman with the imworked
mine of Celtic mythology at his disposal. He has
thus not only the mystic insight and imagination,

W. B. YEATS 159

but also a beautiful symbolism. He is a true child
of Blake, but by working through a different sym-
bolism, he has woven a new and luminous vesture
for the vision he has seen with the piercing insight
of the mystic.

Celtic mysticism holds a place of rare beauty
among the mysticisms of the past. It has had none
of the metaphysical subtlety of the East, and has
been splendidly free from barren abstractions. It
has had the sweet breath of the earth in it, for it has
loved the earth with its mountains and valleys, its
seas and its lakes, its reeds and its sedge.

It has caught a glimpse in these things of a beauty
which yet eludes it. Still more have lovers seen in
the face of the beloved an alluring beauty which has
filled them with a mighty desire to behold " the
secret, far off. Inviolate Rose." Thus have they
been drawn on to the rarer atmosphere of the things
of the spirit while earth's winds and waves kept
them clean and sweet. Yet there has been a sound as
of keening from the lovers. There is a fund of sad-
ness in Beauty's face. The lover could not endure
to gaze on Beauty's unveiled face save for a moment,
and that moment robbed him of his rest on earth.
Then must he fight his battles, strike his lyre, sing
his songs, hunt with his hounds, and feast with his
comrades, till in his own land among the dead he
might hope to gaze unflinchingly on the Inviolate
Rose for ever.

i6o VISION AND VESTURE

Celtic mysticism is fully embodied in the stories
of Irish heroes and seers whom Lady Gregory has
made to live again in the imaginations of modern
readers. Yeats has had a double approach to them.
Through Lady Gregory he has made himself familiar
with Conchubar and Cuchulain of Muirthemne; he
has caught the spirit of Oisin and contrasted it with
the spirit of S. Patrick's monkish Christianity; he
has read the hearts of mild Deirdre and amorous
Maeve, of pitiful Findabair and proud Emer, and
understood the secret of their charm. In addition
to his studies he has penetrated to the bright
sculptures of Los' Halls, and there he has seen
for himself the imperishable deeds of Ireland's
brave warriors and fair women. Having thus
renewed his inspiration from the Great Memory, he
has given to his best poetry and plays that touch
of perennial youthfulness which promises their
immortahty.

Yeats has drunk so deeply of Blake's spirit that
it matters little to him whether he approach God
through religion, or beauty. On the whole he prefers
to think of God as Eternal Beauty and to imagine
Him as the " secret, far off. Inviolate Rose." The
faces of Deirdre and Aillinn are petals of the Secret
Rose, and their insatiable lovers can never be satis-
fied but in death with that beauty they have seen
in the face of their beloved. For beyond Death is
the Land of Heart's Desire.

W. B. YEATS i6i

Where nobody gets old and godly and grave,
Where nobody gets old and crafty and wise,
Where nobody gets old and bitter of tongue.

Where beauty has no ebb, decay no flood.
But joy is wisdom. Time an endless song.

Yeats by his constant approach to God through
Beauty reveals himself an artist. No one has under-
stood better than he that it is the artist's calhng to
create beautiful things, or that the man wedded to
causes, or possessed by party spirit or zealous to
teach others will mar the beauty of his work. Yet
the artist by discovering his conception of the
Beautiful cannot help affecting the morals of those
who receive his spirit. Yeats sees beauty wherever
he detects life, and he detects life not in the " settled
men," but in all manner of lawless people. That is
the secret of Jesus Christ's preference for the com-
pany of publicans and harlots to that of scribes and
pharisees. When any one is sufficiently soaked in
Yeats' work to discover for himself the hidden
beauty in outcasts and pariahs, his moral garment
will be rent in twain ; and in casting away his filthy
rags, an inheritance from the Law, he will by faith
put on a white linen garment which is the righteous-
ness of the Saints. For Beauty like the word of God
" is sharper than any two-edged sword, and pierces
even to the dividing asunder of soul and spirit."

So while admitting that Yeats has no consciously
didactic aim, he necessarily teaches, and we must

\6i VISION AND VESTURE

proceed to unfold the implicit teaching of his
plays.

One must not forget that Yeats is one of a Httle
band. He has always admitted how much he owes to
Lady Gregory. Synge has influenced him, and the
delicate porcelain beauty of A. E.'s poetry has pene-
trated his spirit. His teaching (one might say theirs)
can be gathered best from two plays in which Lady
Gregory gave much help. Where There is Nothing
came first, but not satisfied with it, Yeats tried again
and produced The Unicorn from the Stars. There
the mystic seer is Martin Hearne. Martin knows the
value of leisure, and will not let himself be made
stupid by the dull routine of work. He has his
vision, but it is only slowly he can piece out its
meaning. At first the command seems to point to
destruction. " Destroy, destroy, destruction is the
life-giver." Yeats has a lingering tenderness for
shattering. He has seen the secret Rose, and he has
darted instinctively to the notion that there is no
way to the Inviolate Rose but by the way of destruc-
tion. So his hero but half illumined calls from the
roads (" the roads are the great things, they never
come to an end ") the law breakers, the tinkers, the
sieve-makers, the^sheep-stealers. With their help,
he would " burn away a great deal that men have
piled up upon the earth," that men may be brought
" once more to the wildness of the clean green earth."
Then only when Law and State and Church are

W. B. YEATS 163

destroyed will life become " like a flame of fire, like
a burning eye." He exults when the sword with
a sound like laughter has cut away everything,
for where there is nothing — there is God. So much
does Martin learn from his first vision. But another
vision makes all things clearer to him, and he learns
that his business is not reformation but revelation.
He says, " I was mistaken when I set out to destroy
Church and Law. The battle we have to fight is
fought out in our own mind. There is a fiery moment,
perhaps once in a lifetime, and in that moment we
see the only thing that matters. It is in that moment
the great battles are lost and won, for in that
moment we are part of the host of heaven."
This fuller vision brings us back to Blake.

Bring me my Bow of burning gold —

Bring me my arrows of desire;

Bring me my spear; O Clouds, unfold!

Bring me my Chariot of Fire !

I will not cease from mental fight.

Nor shall my Sword sleep in my hand,

Till we have built Jerusalem

In England's green and pleasant land.

Yeats' inspiration has resulted from his power to

enter Los' Halls, or as he would say, from his ability

to link himself to the Great Memory. In children

the separating veil is almost transparent, and their

charm lies in their drawing from the Great Memory

unconsciously. A difficulty arises when we are no

longer children. Blake grew in child-likeness as the

years advanced. A regular and steady growth in

i64 VISION AND VESTURE

spirituality would ensure the necessary chUd-spirit
to the end. Then very Uttle is needed to link on to
the Great Memory. The wrong method is by in-
cantations and magic. To the sensitive almost any
rhythm is sufficient, the highest kind of rhythm
being poetry. Yeats insists that all great literature
is renewed from the Great Memory, and in so doing
it returns to the primeval founts. This concep-
tion rules out the specious modernism which would
make all literature ephemeral. Great literature
is " written speech," and hence the value of
words, style, and of drama. Yeats differs from the
Victorians in insisting on Blake's great principle
of forgiveness as an essential part of the creative
artist's equipment. Forgiveness till seventy times
seven is little more than theoretic in practical
Christianity: in reality it is as necessary for the
artist as the Christian. The moment the artist
ceases to forgive the creature of his hand, he has
stepped down from the Immortals, and his work
can no longer be reckoned great literature. This
principle rigorously apphed would leave us little
more than Shakespeare out of our English litera-
ture, and reminds one of Tolstoi's definition of art
which left, when applied, not even Shakespeare.
Still it is a counsel of perfection that the highest artist
should forgive all his creatures and must allow him-
self no sort of resentment even against the worst.
These principles apphed to the dramatist become

W. B. YEATS 165

of extreme importance. Yeats has been explicit on
the modern drama in Samhain. Its function is first
" to excite the intellect; " second, to restore words
to their sovereignty; third, to simplify acting and
make everything subject to the words. Even the
scenery must be largely called up by the words.
Yeats has been guided by a sure instinct in this
insistence on beautiful words. On the one side he
is linked to the French stylists, on the other the
rhythm of beautiful words has ever linked him
speedily to the Great Memory; and when that is
accomplished for any one, literature has fulfilled its
purpose.

Drama deals with life itself. Blake has said,
Whatsoever lives is holy, and therefore for the
drama nothing is common or unclean. With a fine
catholicity it seeks only to hear the pulse of life.

It cares for all live people without respect of
persons. It is equally at ease with the sinner or the
saiat. It is zealous only to prune away what clogs
the sap of life. It stands beyond good and evil by
its yea to life. Thence it passes to flaming love. In
this flame all things are consumed and there emerge
only those clean, guileless children who reflect in
their depths the eternal Beauty of God.

Thus Yeats unifies his religion, philosophy, and
art, and sees these things as the flame-like expression
of Life.

i66 VISION AND VESTURE

CHAPTER XVI

MODERN RELIGIOUS MOVEMENTS

Theological polemic has completely changed its
ground in our time. Formerly controversies more
or less bitter were waged between Church and
Church, sect and sect. Now the battle is being
fought out between the younger members of each
Church and its older members who adhere rigidly
to the traditions handed down from their fathers.
This civil religious warfare results in painful anom-
alies like the Wars of the Roses ; but it will prob-
ably result also in purging the separate bodies
and bringing them to a much closer union in the
future.

The modern movement in religion is partly the
outcome of the individual members of religious
bodies feeling cramped within the narrow pen of
their fold. Thousands were, of course, too narrow
in heart and brain ever to perceive that the reUgious
atmosphere was asphyxiated; but those who longed
to stretch themselves and breathe a free air were
bound to turn their attention to the work of the
Higher Critics and to enquiries into the origin of
Christianity. Among these were the leaders of the
Broad Church School in the Church of England

MODERN RELIGIOUS MOVEMENTS 167

sixty years ago. Three names stand out in clear
relief, Dean Stanley, Robertson of Brighton, and
Frederick Denison Maurice.

Dean Stanley was charming and vague; Robert-
son left the memory of a fine character and a few
great sermons; Maurice, though persecuted by
High Church and Low Church ahke, has since his
death influenced every section of the Enghsh Church.

The Oxford Movement was much too intent on
reafiirming first principles to have anything to do
with the modern movement. But as so often
happens, in order to live it died, and rose again in
the Lux Mundi School. The Iaxk Mundi men were
a combination of Pusey and Maurice, and allowed
themselves very cautiously to criticise the Old
Testament. It has produced men hke Bishop Gore,
R. C. Moberly and Canon Scott Holland. This in
its turn is being forced to yield to a younger school
which has seen instinctively that it is impossible to
remain in any half-way house; and that critical
methods, if admitted at all, must be applied to the
end, no matter what that end may be. The half-way
men have been frightened to advance, lest a few
more steps would take them out of Christianity
altogether, and they have been as uncompromising
in their attitude to the younger school, as the
tractarians were to them. The dash forward made
by the young men is leading to quite unexpected
developments. Spiritual progress is not in straight

1 68 VISION AND VESTURE

lines but in a spiral. The young men have com-
pleted a cycle, and find themselves in the very heart
of Christianity again, able to comprehend the many
forms in which Christianity has manifested itself in
the past; able to understand without serviUty the
best thought of to-day, and likely to renew with a
fresh lease of life the Church of England which,
however much sneered at, shows from time to time
a surprising power of recuperation.

The modern controversy has shown itself most
acutely in the Roman Catholic Church. Much that
has been written by her modernist writers sounds to
English Church ears a trifle stale since it had been
said and said well by F. D. Maurice; but the Roman
writers have been even more thorough than our
Broad Church writers in digging down to the
foundations and facing fearlessly results even if they
touched their sacred doctrine of the Mass. Loisy
has gone almost beyond the Germans in his ruth-
less criticism, and he has been tainted with the
German malady of accommodating facts to a theory.
George Tyrrell showed how devoutly and con-
structively the thankless task of criticism could be
carried on. Baron von Hiigel — the biggest mind
of all — uniting profound learning with a humble
and child-like spirit, has co-ordinated the best
results of modern thought, and shown how they
do not contradict but elucidate the best Catholic
tradition when purged by criticism of adventitious

MODERN RELIGIOUS MOVEMENTS 169

elements. Unfortunately modernism is dead —
killed by the encyclical letter (" Pascendi Gregis ")
of Pope Pius X. But it will rise again, and Tyrrell's
vision of a new Catholicism as far transcending
the old Catholicism as Christianity transcended
Judaism may yet be realised, though we shall hardly
live to see it.

The nonconformist bodies in England have also
gone forward with more or less success. R. J.
Campbell with less delicacy of touch than Tyrrell
has stated his principles in his book. The New
Theology. The book was much too hastily written,
and Campbell did not do himself justice. No
catholic writer would presume to write on the deep-
est questions of life and religion, and think to do
it adequately in three weeks ! ^

The Bodies which deserve most honourable
mention are the Primitive Methodists, and the
Quakers. The Primitive Methodists have shown
themselves quite extraordinarily free from pre-
judice; and the Quakers by their mystical instincts
have always been able to separate the Spirit of
Christianity from the symbol through which it
might express itself.

What is this spirit working through the most
■advanced sects and the most conservative Church?

' Since writing the above I am informed that Campbell has
joined the English Church, and that he is withdrawing his New
Theology. We shall, doubtless, see fresh developments.

1 70 VISION AND VESTURE

It is a great constructive spirit struggling to effect
its purpose by setting free the human Imagination.

The frank acceptance of criticism has served to
destroy the accretion of centuries which hid the
figure of Christ. When at last the Christ began to
emerge, it was found that He spoke mainly in
images that had long ceased to be ours. At once
foolish and learned professors announced that the
Christian system was obsolete. But patient dealing
with the apocalyptic imagery of Christ has made
clear a principle of paramount importance. The
great Hebrew Prophets were great seers, whose
minds habitually worked in images. The mind of
Jesus Christ was of the same order working at the
highest creative pitch. The vision was His, the
Vesture was supplied by the apocalyptic language of
the people. By compelling this material to clothe
His vision, He showed Himself a supreme artist;
He uttered a message which could be understood
by the humblest of His hearers; and He could leave
His Gospel of the Kingdom fearlessly to the future,
knowing that if its symbolical vesture waxed old,
the vision could clothe itself afresh in the popular
imagery of any country where the word of the
Kingdom should be preached.

Blake's influence has not been working at the
back of the movement in the Churches; hitherto
it has inspired those who have held themselves
aloof. But now the Churches are beginning to

MODERN RELIGIOUS MOVEMENTS 171

realize the place of imagination in the spiritual life
they will discover that Blake has much to say to
them; and that with his help their great task will
be made easier — the task of Christening modem
thought, and of showing that the modern ideal of
hxunan values was already imaged in the Person of
Jesus Christ Himself.

The mysticism of Blake has of course many
points of contact with our modem mystical move-
ments. Foremost amongst these is the theosophical.
Theosophy is new only in Europe; in Asia it has
its roots deep and far in the hoary past. Its branches
have stretched into every land, and in each land
that has had any mysticism of native growth,
theosophy has made itself at home. It is impossible
to sum up in a few words the teaching of a cult that
has had so many ramifications. Its main principles
do not make it distinctive from other religions.
Foremost it places the doctrine of brotherhood
which it pursues with much gentleness and sweet-
ness and kindness. The doctrine of Reincarnation
is always associated with theosophy, but it has
been held by many who were not theosophists, and
it is not necessary to subscribe to it in order to
become a theosophist.

In our own time theosophy has become more
familiar through the tireless energy and eloquence
of Mrs. Annie Besant; and as seen by us, it has
reflected some of the phases of Mrs. Besant herself.

172 VISION AND VESTURE

When Mrs. Besant, seeking help of Dr. Pusey and
Dean Stanley to steady her tottering faith and find-
ing none, came out of Christianity altogether, her
reaction carried her very far into atheism. Her
atheistic period was by no means wasted. Bradlaugh
was a fine mentor for any woman; he insisted on
thoroughness and accuracy in Mrs. Besant's intel-
lectual pursuits, and these hard qualities were soon
manifested in her lectures on the French Revolution.
Her socialism was equally valuable as it led her to
study economics, and the knowledge of economics
has served her as it has served Bernard Shaw in the
same way that the knowledge of anatomy served
Michael Angelo.

Mrs. Besant did not escape the bitterness of all
reactionaries, and for many years she was hostile
to Christianity. Since she became a theosophist
through the influence of Madame Blavatsky, she
has been learning to see Christianity from within.
With this fresh-gained insight the bitterness and
hostility have vanished, until she has come very
near to Christianity again, and with her she has
brought her immense following who invariably show
much goodwill and brotherliness to those who are
really Christian. Mrs. Besant's Esoteric Christianity
makes the attitude of modern theosophy to Christi-
anity sufficiently clear. Much of what she says
takes one back to the almost forgotten controversies
of the first two centuries of Christianity when it was

MODERN RELIGIOUS MOVEMENTS 173

defining its position as against gnosticism. Mrs.
Besant, for example, takes the gnostic view of the
Baptism of Jesus, that the Christ came upon Him
from without, instead of the more beautiful and
simpler catholic view that it was an unveiling of
what was within.

There is little tha' theosophy would controvert
in the teaching of Blake. It takes his apocalyptic
view of regeneration, his doctrine of judgment as a
present process ; it finds like him that the Eternal is
dways present to the wise; and it understands far
better than most Christians Blake's doctrine of all
things being imaged in the sculptured Halls of Los'
Palace. Theosophy calls the sculptured Halls the
Akaschic Records, and claims that its seers have
access to these Records, and thus gain a secret know-
ledge of things and events which is only possible
for those in an advanced stage of spiritual con-
sciousness.

But theosophy has not Blake's edge. Its eclectic
instincts make it seek the common ground in all
religions. It aims at impartiality and tolerance;
and while leaving bigotry and persecution far
behind, its virtues have been its bane. Impartiality
paralyses, and tolerance easily becomes inertia.
Theosophy has not yet understood the wrath of the
Lamb. Its sweetness needs redemption. Just here,
Blake was supremely right. Like Christ he pro-
claimed the power of mercy, gentleness, pity and

174 VISION AND VESTURE

forgiveness, but like Christ he also carried a sword.
" Think not that I am come to send peace on earth:
I came not to send peace, but a sword; " was the
astonishing word of the Prince of Peace. And again:
" I am come to send fire on earth."

Theosophy must learn to grasp the Christian
sword and kindle a pitiless fire if it would help to
create a new heaven and a new earth wherein
dwelleth righteousness.

William Blake, it is admitted by all, was a
Christian. If theosophy claims him too, there can
be no real objection. Jacob Boehme was called the
Teutonic Theosopher. In the strictest meaning of
the word theosophy — the wisdom of God — ^we can
gladly admit that Blake was the finest theosophist
of modern times.

Among mystical movements Christian Science
merits a place, in spite of the fact that Mrs.
Eddy vigorously repudiated mysticism along with
pantheism and hypnotism in Science and Health.
Christian Science was fundamentally a search for
unity as the basis of all things. Mrs. Eddy, revolting
from the crude duahsm of American protestant
churches, and finding herself faced by two apparent
entities, mind and matter, hastily denied matter,
and affirmed the sole reality of mind. By this simple
process she separated herself from pantheism which
believes in matter, and arrived at basic unity; but
the undue simplification overlooked stubborn facts.

MODERN RELIGIOUS MOVEMENTS 175

and the facts are slowly and surely taking their
revenge. Mrs. Eddy had Httle of Mrs. Annie
Besant's great learning, or she would have known
that, before Christ, Hindoo theosophists had alter-
nately affirmed and denied matter for countless
generations, and she might with patient study
have found out all that results from den3dng matter,
without plunging her miUion followers into a gulf
before they could learn it by a prolonged and painful
experience.

Since mind is the only reality, it followed quite
logically that sin, sickness, old age and death have
no real existence. Their apparent existence arises
from the delusion of mortal mind. Hence, once a
man affirms the reality of mind, and denies the
reality of all else, he shakes himself free from illusory
sin and disease, and enters into eternal life. Since
Mrs. Eddy adhered to the Scriptures, there was no
need to coin a new phrase like " Mortal mind," she
might have kept to St. Paul's phrase — the mind of
the fiesh, <t>povrjfia. ttjs a-apKos — and so have avoided
some confusion. By denying matter, Mrs. Eddy
discredited completely the evidence of the senses;
she robbed the artist of any medium of ex-
pression; she refused to see that God was mani-
festing Himself in the swift advance of medical
science as in other sciences; she struck at the roots
of catholic theology which built itself up on the
Word made Flesh; and the nervous tension pro-

176 VISION AND VESTURE

duced by those who were striving to affirm mind
and deny the evidence of their stubborn bodies, was
sometimes more detrimental to health than the
diseases they were tr5dng to combat. These are
negative results producing positive harm. Yet
withal Christian Science has done an amazing
amount of good. It has actually healed in tens of
thousands of cases what it professed to heal. It has
brought the knowledge of eternal life to all its
adherents. It has found men and women listless,
weary, useless, and made them contented, cheerful,
efficient members of society. It is, of course, a heresy,
that is, if pressed on it would end in subverting
the truth, but like most heresies it has aroused the
Church and set it thinking furiously ; and itself has
given birth to a movement which is far nearer to
the fundamental truth of things.

Mental Science or Higher Thought is the offspring
of Christian Science disinherited by its parent. The
first teachers of Higher Thought had all been
through the ranks of Christian Science and left it
behind.

It is precisely in those points that Mental Science
differs from Christian Science that it approaches
towards the teaching of William Blake. Mental
Science has reaffirmed the reality of matter.
Matter may change its form a thousand times, and
it is never what it seems, but it is, and matter and
mind though apparent contraries mutually exist.

MODERN RELIGIOUS MOVEMENTS 177

Mental Science has not bound itself down to de-
fining what matter is, but it fits with perfect ease
into the theory of electrons enunciated by Sir
Oliver Lodge, and the dissociability of matter into
ether taught by Dr. Le Bon. Again Mrs. Eddy in
Science and Health defined man as a reflection of God.
Mental Science thinks that if man is the image of
God, he is something more than a reflection. There
is a still more important difference. Christian
Science works by a hard and difficult mental process
of affirmations and denials. Mental Science works
by a divine process of imagination. It is learning
the creative power of imagination. By holding its
patients in the imagination and seeing them whole,
it sends out a life-stream to the sick in body, which
reinforces the mysterious heahng forces in nature,
and often has power to make them whole.

By affirming the reality of matter Mental Science
has run too precipitately towards pantheism. It
might have learnt when it separated from its mother
Christian Science that creation is parturition.
When Mental Science, and Theosophy, and Bernard
Shaw, and W. B. Yeats, and the host of modern
thinkers at last learn the old Christian doctrine that
creation is separation, and that the life of union
with God is effected by the eternal separation of
the Creator and the creature, then they will unite
in one great front and go forward girt with their
swords to do service for the Lord of Hosts.

M

178 VISION AND VESTURE

We have seen in our study of Blake, the important
place he gives to his doctrine of contraries; and
that with him Imagination is the Real Man. It is
Mental Science that has accomplished most by
working with these great truths. By being loyal
to these principles it should be enabled to make a
rich offering to the spiritual treasury of humanity.

These movements have aroused the Church of
England, and there has arisen in her a body called
the Guild of Health which believes in healing of the
body as a part of the Christian heritage, and is
striving to place it on a sound theological basis. It
has made amply clear that healing was part of the
Gospel program of the first four centuries of the
Church; that it has persisted through the Saints
unbrokenly till to-day; that there is for it a sacra-
ment of Unction, but that it is not confined to
priestly channels but flows through the consecrated
hands of many men and women who have dedicated
their lives to God.

For many centuries tUl the nineteenth, theology
had made the dualism of soul and body as sharp as
possible. In its apologetics for immortaUty it had
tried with all its might to prove the inherent im-
mortality of the soul. As the body, by the most
incontrovertible of facts, did not share in this im-
mortality, and the soul could not be left without a
body for eternity, it was necessary that the mortal
body after death should be raised up again, that it

MODERN RELIGIOUS MOVEMENTS 179

might be re-united with the soul and partake of its
immortality whether in heaven or in hell.

As a consequence of this teaching, Christians in
their striving for a spiritual life ignored their bodies,
and claimed only for their souls the Life which
Christ had said He came to give. This was specially
the case among protestants who made the Bible the
rule of faith, and were for ever reading it. Strangely
enough, in the Gospel story Christ was constantly
healing sick bodies; and His word. Thy faith hath
made thee whole, applied even more often to the
salvation of the body than the soul. But protestants
were so obsessed with the soul that they spiritualised
everything they read, and could not see that there
was any message for the body at all. If Christ
cleansed a leper, then quite clearly it was intended
to teach that He could cleanse the sin of the soul. If
He gave sight to the blind, and hearing to the deaf,
it was to teach that the Saviour of the World could
give sight and hearing to the spiritually bUnd and
deaf.

The revolt against this artificial division of soul
and body resulted in nineteenth-century rationalism.
The rationalists were sure that soul and body were
one; and as they supposed that the soul was a pro-
duct of the brain, they thought it must necessarily
perish with the body. At the same time science was
dogmatically asserting as axiomatic the conserva-
tion of energy, and the indestructibility of matter.

i8o VISION AND VESTURE

and death was therefore regarded by the rationalists
as the dissolution of the person into gas. Still there
was the craving for some kind of immortality, and
the old doctrine condemned as superstitious revived
in an attenuated doctrine of subjective immortality.
This was the teaching of Comte, George Eliot, and
Samuel Butler, its finest expression being in George
Eliot's positivist hj'mn.

O may I join the choir invisible

Of those immortal dead who live again

In minds made better by their presence; live

In pulses stirred to generosity.

In deeds of daring rectitude, in scorn

For miserable aims that end with self.

In thoughts sublime that pierce the night like stars,

And with their mild persistence urge man's search

To vaster issues.

So to live is heaven.

May I reach
That purest heaven, be to other souls
The cup of strength in some great agony,
Enkindle generous ardour, feed pure love.
Beget the smiles that have no cruelty —
Be the sweet presence of a good diffused,
And in diffusion ever more intense.
So shall I join the choir invisible
Whose music is the gladness of the world.

This was the inevitable rebound from a distorted
doctrine of immortality, but it could never be the
permanent solution of the time-honoured problem.
Christian apologists have studied the ground of their
hope afresh, and there is emerging a deeper and far
more comprehensive doctrine of immortality than

MODERN RELIGIOUS MOVEMENTS i8i

has been held for many hundreds of years. For
whether the soul is immortal or not Christianity, in
the first instance, did not build on its immortality,
but Christ enunciated a doctrine of eternal life which
is startling in its originality, its simplicity and its
comprehensiveness. " This is hfe eternal that they
might know thee the only true God, and Jesus Christ
whom thou hast sent." * Eternal life, then, stands
in the knowledge of God. This knowledge is latent in
every man. When man is born again of the Spirit
and his Real Man is unveiled, he becomes conscious
that he has eternal life, and from this glowing con-
sciousness arises his hope for the future. Having
learned that his body and soul are one, he finds
by experience that his body shares in the soul's
quickening. On re-reading the Gospels he sees that
Christ had set up no artificial barrier between the
soul and body, and therefore the body could not
fairly be excluded from the Life which was claimed
for the soul. This involves the immortality of the
body. Members of the Catholic and Apostolic
Church, and later many mystical Christians having
gone thus far, affirmed that they had overcome
death, and therefore would pass like Enoch and
Elijah to full glory. Out of this confusion it is
becoming gradually clear that the real or spiritual
body is built up by the spirit, just as the soul builds
up its own appropriate naturd (soulish) body; that

1 John xvii. 3.

1 82 VISION AND VESTURE

this spiritual body shares in the immortality of the
spirit; that it interpenetrates and envelopes itself in
an outer earthly body which is subject to a con-
tinual flux, but which is necessary so long as the
Real Man has to function on this earth. While
the outer body is thus tenanted it is quickened
and strong to resist disease, but at death, the
spiritual body is released, and the earthly body no
longer needed returns to its mother earth, and falls
rapidly to dust.

Thus there is a deeper and more spiritual view of
immortality than our fathers knew, and at the same
time there is a more passionate insistence on the
body, allowing in a christened form the pagan
worship of its form, the artist's vision of its beauty,
and the saint's perception of its sweet fragrance.

Once more William Blake has uttered the illu-
minating word. He condemned as error the notion,
" that man has two real existing principles, viz. a
Body and a Soul." He affirmed that " Man has
no Body distinct from his Soul, for that called Body
is a portion of Soul discerned by the five senses, the
chief inlets of Soul in this age." *

From this results what Modernism and post-
Modernism, New Theology, and Mental Science,
Theosophy and Mysticism, Higher Thought and
Modem Thought are striving to effect — the Marriage
of Heaven and Hell.

' The Marriage of Heaven and Hell, 4.

THE SAINTS OF THE FUTURE 183
CHAPTER XVII

THE SAINTS OF THE FUTURE

During the course of our study of Blake and
modem thought various types of man have emerged
all more or less tentative. Each type is open to
much criticism, and the general feeling is that the
Real Man, the Pope Angelico, the world teacher, the
superman is yet to come. At present we have the
neo-pagan, the neo-mystic, the Nietzschean super-
man, the Shavian superman ; and these have arisen
because of the destructive criticism to which Christi-
anity and its Founder have been subjected during
the last hundred years. Once the Christ, the measure
of man, the Judge, is deposed, then there is im-
mediately the need for a new Man by which men
with their thousand contrary impulses may know
what they are, and to what they can conform.

Criticism began with the Bible. Here was a book
regarded by catholics and protestants alike as
plenarily inspired and therefore infallible. The first
higher critics were excessively crude, and their
methods were repellent; but they had sufificient
vitahty in them to evolve, and by the end of the
first half of the nineteenth century, Strauss in
Germany, and Renan in France, proved themselves
imaginative critics of a fairly high order. Strauss'
work showed all the German thoroughness, and was

1 84 VISION AND VESTURE

relentless in its searching criticism. Renan was
extraordinarily acute whether in his criticism of the
Bible or of the Liberal CathoHcs of Saint Sulpice;
and he was more than a critic. His fine interpreta-
tion of the Song of Solomon was creative; it was
only when he tried to fill the gaps of the Gospel story
that he wrote what he meant to be " true because
'twere pity if it were not."

The obvious shortcomings of Strauss and Renan
gave the orthodox a handle to discount their true
value. Nevertheless their truth has prevailed; and
to-day, no one, unless he has strong religious
prejudices, can read the Bible without having to
face the real difficulties that were raised by Strauss
and Renan.

The proved fallibility of the Bible was a terrible
shock to protestantism, but for a long time it was
thought that Catholicism could hold out as it was
not built on a Book. In reality the miraculous Book
is involved with the miraculous Church, and one
cannot touch her book without subjecting herself
and her dogmas to the disintegrating fire of criticism.
But the critics had no intention of stopping short of
the Bible. They proceeded to exemiine one by one
the foundation doctrines which were held by
catholic and protestant alike, and one by one when
taken literally they crumbled in their hands.

InfalHbility whether of the Book, the Church or
the Pope vanished Hke a fond dream. The doctrines

THE SAINTS OF THE FUTURE 185

of substitutionary Atonement, everlasting punish-
ment, the Virgin Birth, and the physical Resurrec-
tion and Ascension of Christ followed, and when the
critics had gone thus far, they naturally declared
that Christianity was played out. For a time the
free-thinkers held on to the Christian morals, while
abandoning the Christian dogmas. But eventually
it was found that the dogmas involved the morals,
and therefore in common consistency the morals
must go also. This work of destruction was not left
only to dry critics, it was carried on by men and
women of fine imaginative gifts, Carlyle, Arnold,
George Eliot, Meredith, Swinburne, Hardy, Samuel
Butler, Oscar Wilde, and Bernard Shaw, not to
mention a host on the Continent; and they have
accomplished the work of destruction so thoroughly,
that criticism finds itself out of work, and is about
to resign its thankless task to the creative genius
as soon as it shall please him to make his appearance.
When criticism had progressed so far that it could
no longer be ignored, it made plain a fact which
before had been less obvious. Catholicism and pro-
testantism had an inner kernel and an outer shell,
and both had regarded the inner and outer as one.
The protestant who had experienced the new birth
and the baptism of fire, testified of what he had seen
and known. He knew that criticism could not touch
his treasure, and therefore for a long time he ignored
it. The spiritually-minded cathoUc also found that

1 86 VISION AND VESTURE

every word and every letter of his faith stood for
some truth which he had confirmed by experience,
and he held on to every letter lest one drop of
precious truth should be spilled. Many who attacked
the shell had httle knowledge of the kernel; but
when at last criticism insisted on being heard, then
those who possessed the kernel were forced to
make a sharp division between the inward truth
and its outward manifestation, between the vision
and its vesture, and to inquire into the law which
governs the clothing of the Spirit of Life in all ages.
Carlyle's Sartor Resartus was a fine contribution so
far as it went; but necessarily the task demanded
one who had a perfect understanding of the spirit
of Catholicism, who was inside, and who reahsed
that though the Church is bound to be conservative,
yet she is dynamic; and that therefore in every age
there is a great work to be done in adapting her
tradition to the growing light and reason of the
time, without allowing any truth to escape which it
is her business to guard. The attempt to meet this
need has been made by a crop of modernists in the
Roman Catholic Church. Realising that it was
impossible to tamper with the creeds, they turned
their attention to the nature of dogma, and declared
that the dogmas of the Church were the best possible
symbolical clothing of the spirit of truth which
had been reached in the past. A dogma was an
approximative and not an absolute statement, and

THE SAINTS OF THE FUTURE 187

was therefore liable to be improved, and could not
be argued about like positive literal statements. In
a word the Creed is a symbolical and not a literal
statement of the truth.

At once the modernists laid themselves open to
a double attack. The Roman Church, which has
always borne fine testimony to the paramount im-
portance of the historical element in the Creeds,
said that, regarded as symbol only, they quickly
evaporated; and those who were in the modern
sjmibolist movement, asked why a particular set of
symbols should be adhered to, when they might be
replaced by others more adequate. Here was an
impasse and the Church of Rome has temporarily
triumphed. But the question was much too big to
resolve itself into a simple Either — or, like Goethe's
Either religion or art. The Church of Rome is fond
of siitiplif5dng to a peremptory Either — or, when
in reality there is a third course. Here, she says.
Either the whole letter or nothing. We beg respect-
fully to say that while all is symbol there is sufficient
of the letter to allow of a strong historical founda-
tion without accepting the whole. It is the work of
the higher critics to decide the extent of the letter.

The higher critics have done much, perhaps all
that is necessary. Beginning with the Bible, they
have abolished all lazy thinking, which would say
that the Bible is either history or allegory. The
Bible contains history, myth, legend, poetry,

i88 VISION AND VESTURE

allegory and symbol, prophecies, letters, and revela-
tion. It has an impassioned oriental love song which
may be treated symbolically because love itself is a
symbol. It has many statements beginning " Thus
saith the Lord," but which, like all other statements,
need to be tried at the bar of human experience.
It has a fourfold presentation of the Gospel of Jesus
Christ, the first three aiming at a didactic presenta-
tion of the facts, and sjnnbolical so far as they are
true, and the fourth a symbolical treatment of the
facts which has proved true in many ages of human
experience. Thus while the Bible consists of hetero-
geneous elements, aU the parts are symbohcal, for
ever5^where we get the garments with which pro-
found human experiences have clothed themselves.

The simplest Creed — the Apostles' — ^is also com-
posite, and like the Bible gains its unity from its
symbolical value. All its clauses are built upon three
s5^mbolical statements of belief — I believe in God
the Father . . . and in Jesus Christ His only Son
. . . and in the Holy Ghost. The first is a symbol
taken from" the primary human relation, and while
falling short of the whole truth is the nearest to
express God's relation to His creatures. The second
is also borrowed from the human relation and adds
a historical person Jesus, and a historical S5mibol
Christ. Achildcanlearn to know Jesus; the symbol
Christ can only be fully understood after a pro-
longed historical study of the growth of the Messianic

THE SAINTS OF THE FUTURE 189

idea through many prophets until it received its last
interpretation in the mind of Jesus, and became
through Him a symbol of world-wide significance.

The third is a symbol taken from man's subjective
experience of spiritual good and evil, and hence the
Holy Ghost. The historical elements of the Creed,
then, centre around the Person of Jesus Christ.
Every spiritual Christian whether a catholic or a
quaker knows that Christ is born, grows, dies, rises
again and ascends in him. Christ born in him is
regeneration, and Christ ascended in him is Christ
come to sovereign control and power over the soul
after the darkness and conflict of its being crucified
with Christ. To be united with Christ in the heavenly
places is the highest flight of the Christian soul. Now
are these experiences of the Christian merely sub-
jective or have they their objective counterpart?
The Creed states that Jesus Christ was born (In-
carnation), that He died (Atonement), that He rose
again (Regeneration), that He ascended (Sanctifica-
tion). The first two statements are both historical
and symbolical; the other two are of a different
order. Not every one could see Jesus after His
resurrection. " Their eyes were holden." There was
need of heart preparation that they might know
that it was the Lord. For this reason the test of the
Resurrection is spiritual rather than historical, and
the question that remains is whether the Resurrec-
tion and Ascension are objectively true. To this

igo VISION AND VESTURE

Christianity demands the answer " Yes." Jesus the
Christ who lived the Eternal Life, after He was
crucified, was seen of His disciples; and they ex-
plained the mode of His appearances as well as they
could from their Rabbinical lore. After that, Jesus
Christ reached the goal of His spiritual self which
included His body, and this goal was the place of all
authority and power so that, instead of being limited
by body to a little flock in Palestine, He could go
forth unhindered and act intimately on the hearts
of men and women from His unseen centre of life.
If the great events in the Lord's life com-
memorated by Christmas, Good Friday, Easter
and Ascension Day in the ecclesiastical year are
objective facts, then the creed is rooted in history,
and it is relatively unimportant whether the remain-
ing clauses are sjnnbol or fact. The clause " Born
of the Virgin Mary " cannot be put to any subjective
test like the Resurrection. It is a question of history
and evidence. Symbolically it is valuable because
the persistent experience of the new birth of the
Spirit which every Christian knows finds its anti-
type in the Christ who, though born of a human
mother, has the over-shadowing of the spirit thrown
back to the moment of His conception in His
Mother's womb. Also the Virgin-Mother stands for
the ideal of Virginity and the ideal of Motherhood
in one; for the Church like her Divine Lord has
always insisted that some are called to the virgin
life, and therein find their highest blessedness.

THE SAINTS OF THE FUTURE 191

The descent into Hades symbolises the eternal
truth that human deeds have a transcendent value.
The supreme act of Christ's life — His self-oblation
on the cross — was not only the starting point for
the Church militant here on earth, but it reached to
the world beyond where human thoughts and aspira-
tions, human deeds and failures are sealed and abide
among the imperishable treasures of heaven.

The coming again to judge the quick and the dead
means that Christ is still the measure or touchstone
by which man is tried.

The Communion of Saints not only binds earth to
heaven, but also gives one hope of the time when
the saints on earth shall be bound together in joy-
ous fellowship, without being persecuted for their
loyalty to the truth.

Higher criticism has driven home to Christians
the distinction between the inner and outer content
of their faith. The inner spiritual treasure of the
Church of Rome probably contains everything.
Certainly there is nothing which the loftiest pro-
testant mystic has learnt, which Rome does not
know, and which she has not systematised. Those
who are born in her fold can find and take whatever
nourishment they please. But she has raised an
impassable barrier to those outside with critical
minds, by insisting on acceptance of all the letter
before she will receive them to her bosom. And
much of even Rome's letter kills.

192 VISION AND VESTURE

Besides making a distinction between the inner
and outer, higher criticism has taught us that they
can be entirely separated. In reaUty the religious
genius works like an artist, poet or mystic. He has
his vision, and must clothe it in all the mental
images available. It is clear now that Jesus of
Nazareth clothed His vision mainly in the apoca-
lyptic imagery of His country. His favourite images,
the Kingdom of God, the Messiah, the Messianic
banquet, the Son of Man, expressed for Him and His
disciples His own special Person and message. Yet
if His message had depended on the literal truth of
His images, Christianity would have perished with
its Founder, and it survived because already by the
end of the first century the Messianic images had
been translated into terms of another philosophy,
and instead of the Messiah possessed by the
Holy Spirit, S. John wrote of the Word become
Flesh. This adaptation is the greatest Christianity
has ever made. Its Platonic and Aristotelian
borrowings of a later age were small in comparison.
The fact that it could make such an adaptation
without losing anything of its precious content was
evidence that it was Life itself, and we need not
doubt that this Life will be able to make such
adaptations as may be called for by the twentieth
century.

The shell or clothing of the Christian faith has
suffered very severely, its inner kernel not at all. It

THE SAINTS OF -THE FUTURE 193

is because the garment is rent throughout, and any
patching of the garment only makes the rent worse ;
it is because the old bottles are burst, and the new
wine demands new bottles; it is because the Spirit
of Life has outgrown its old symbols, that there has
grown the urgent need for one to do to-day what
Jesus Christ did in His day — fulfil the law and the
prophets, and also weave a new garment for the
spirit of life and truth. Hence the various tribes
of superman ; the Order of the Star in the East with
its expectation of a world teacher; the advent of the
Pope Angelico; the expectation of the Christ to be.
The neo-pagan ideal proclaimed by Swinburne,
and still preached by Lowes Dickinson can survive
only when transfigured by the Saint. Pure paganism
even if realised, which is impossible, would be
violently retrogressive. In every stage of orderly
growth there is much beauty. Man's childhood is
beautiful; a childish man insufferable. The pagan
stage of man was first beautiful, and then rank, till
Christianity seized hold of the degenerate* pagan
and regenerated him. The spirit of Christianity is
the philosopher's Stone, the everlasting elixir vita ;
and when it penetrated the spirit of the pagan,
discarded what was valueless, and transmuted what
could be preserved in the fibre of the new man. To
become a pagan would effect an unnatural process
of degeneration culminating in a worse sink than
paganism because it would involve the disintegra-

194 VISION AND VESTURE

tion of a higher consciousness. Neo-paganism will
serve a good purpose if it reminds the Churchman of
values to which he has a birthright; but there never
was and never can be a Church of neo-pagans, and
we can dismiss its apostles without more serious
consideration.

Far removed from neo-paganism is the expecta-
tion of a world-teacher by the Order of the Star in
the East to which so many theosophists belong. But
why promise a world-teacher when the vast majority
have not yet learned the elementary lessons of
Christianity? It is hke offering finer music to one
who cannot appreciate the masters, more beautiful
things to one with no idea of the beautiful; heaven
to one who finds nothing to marvel at on earth. If
large numbers of men and women experienced the
wonders of Christianity's new birth, and pressed on
to the fiery baptism of the Spirit, the cry for a world-
teacher would immediately vanish; and sanctified
men and women would arise and solve the pressing
problems of the time as they arose. In any case the
expectation of a world-teacher or a superman is an
anachronism. From a thousand causes we have
learnt to think corporately, I might say, telepathic-
ally. Instead of a soUtary thinker in an isolated
country laboriously studying and thinking as he
burns the night oil, there is now a world-mind to
which all thinkers in all countries instantaneously
contribute; and this all-pervading world-mind

THE SAINTS OF THE FUTURE 195

pressing downwards will incarnate itself not in one
world-teacher, but in a thousand who will spring up
simultaneously; and thus there may yet be realised
on earth a Communion of Saints.

The Nietzschean superman is the finest attempt
at transvaluation of modern times. Superman is
rooted in earth, and however high his blossom, he
never forgets nor spurns his mother. He reaUses
early in his development that strength, growth,
power, and beauty are effects of the Spirit of Life,
and therefore he must, before all things, fan and
nourish the flame of Hfe in himself, and welcome
whatever forms it shall throw out. His surest method
is to trust his instincts, which are life's antennae,
and as he does so he finds that he is being trans-
formed by a mighty power within which brings
him into sharp collision with dead virtues, dead
moralities, and dead conventions. Henceforth it is
war, and superman becomes a valiant warrior. The
crowd ignores his words or misunderstands them.
Becoming vaguely conscious that the things by
which it exists are despised by superman, it begins
to hate him; and when he touches its religion, it
cries, " Away with him! " Superman just here has
thoroughly learned the Christian lesson. He must
allow no resentment to overcome him. The moment
he gives place to resentment, he sinks to the level
of the crowd. Arising in his strength, he casts out
the spirit of resentment once for all, and treats his

196 VISION AND VESTURE

gainsayers with understanding, patience, and sweet-
ness. Here, too, his imagination helps him, for he
detects the comic spirit in the crowd and in himself,
and the comic spirit delivers him from pessimism,
cleanses his intellect, but alienates him for ever from
the crowd which suspects his laughter. So far
superman is entirely Christian and sane, but he is
now at the parting of the ways, and it is the crowd
that is his ruin. Every man of fine intellect must
become acutely conscious of the stupidity of the
mass. In his illusioned youth he may embrace all
he meets with generous faith, and even evoke a
reflex of his own exuberance; but as his intellect
clears, his illusions are destroyed, and he is thrown
more and more in upon himself, depending upon
himself or the chance advent of a kindred spirit.
Superman and Christ perceive that resentment is
merely stupid, but how about contempt? Super-
man is too proud to be resentful, but his pride
permits disdain, and henceforth he despises the
vulgar herd, and declares that he will not be the
herd's herdsman and hound, he will speak only to
companions. The Christ fell back on that human
nature which He shared with the least of His
brethren. Human joys and human sorrows are ever
new. He could enter into these, and see in them
poetry, pathos and humour. More, He CQuld pierce
with His fiery vision to the inner self of the
people and see infinite possibilities even in the worst.

THE SAINTS OF THE FUTURE 197

The miracle of transformation would be wrought,
if heavy-laden hearts could apprehend that there was
One whose love for them was stronger than death.
Whence it comes that whilst superman, the self-elect,
despises the herd, Christ, the God-elect, dies for it.

And that is superman's utter and complete failure.
Superman has been surpassed by the Son of Man, and
we may dismiss him as a teacher, since he has no
further value for us whatever ; our only concern with
him is to try and reach him in his spiritual isolation,
and minister to him while his superb brain reels and
finally collapses.

The Shavian superman has avoided the gulf into
which Nietzsche fell by keeping a fast hold of the
old Christian doctrine that human beings are
members one of another. It is true that this fact
involves much suffering and the apparent injustice
of creating everywhere innocent victims, but it
also involves man's highest glory, since if the sins
of the fathers are visited to the third and fourth
generation, and then nature winds up a bad con-
cern, the deeds of God's lovers persist to a thousand
generations, and men reap a rich harvest of those
things they have not sown. It necessarily follows
that no individual can attain to good apart from
the social organism of which he is a member.
Zarathustra's attempt to surpass man by holding
himself aloof was fatuous. Shaw knows through
and through that we are all victims of the social

198 VISION AND VESTURE

organism, and we can only keep our self-respect by
willing and working for a better social order. Thus
the Shavian superman trusts life and instinct,
follows the divine ego, and is magnificently free
from resentment. With piercing intellectual vision
he goes behind the outward show, and knows what
is in man. He laughs at the human comedy, but not
maliciously, for he has an immense faith that if
men and women were not ground down by a cruel
and relentless capitalist system they might arise to
great things.

So far the Shavian superman while outstripping
the Nietzschean is Christian, but his further develop-
ment is a departure. Shaw is a vitalist, and for
him the life-force, which throws out huge, ungainly,
antediluvian forms, then man, and presently super-
man, is God. God is identified with the Spirit of
life, and whatsoever lives is God. This is pantheism,
and while at first sight it seems to promise infinite
room to breathe in it ends in many negations. It
not only reduces God to an impersonal life-force,
but by identifying man with the impersonal God
gives him personality for three score years and ten,
and then dissipates him into impersonal energy.
There are many pantheists who claim to believe in
a transcendent God, but they only mean that the
life of which they partake is greater than they, that
the whole is greater than its part ; and that is some-
thing much less than the Christian doctrine of trans-

THE SAINTS OF THE FUTURE 199

cendence which beheves that God is not only beyond
man but separate from man, and that man's highest
life is communion with One who is not himself and
yet dwells in him. Religion begins when a man binds
himself to One above him; eternal life begins when
a man, born of the Spirit, communes with the Spirit
which is not his Spirit; romance begins when man
responds to God's love and gives himself to God;
worship begins when man falls down and adores
One who is utterly beyond him. Until superman
adores a transcendent God, he has neither religion
nor worship.

Superman's cult of the ego is as sectarian as the
cult of the alter which it displaced. There is often
great value in detaching a quality and placing it in
a glaring light. It is a kind of work that can be
accomplished by a generation or a century that
has ghded into a backwater. Thus the Victorians
detached man's duty to his neighbour from the
whole duty of man, and while distorting the doctrine
brought out aspects of altruism which are apt to be
forgotten because they are not generally apparent.
George Eliot was the most zealous exponent of the
religion of altruism; Daniel Deronda the greatest
book it produced. Through the author, we know all
about altruism; through the book we can weigh its
merits and demerits. Mordecai was its prophet,
Deronda its high priest: they have only to be placed
by the side of Christ for one moment, and at once

200 VISION AND VESTURE

they lose all significance. But one pearl of priceless
wisdom George Eliot gave to us from her impas-
sioned experience. Religion, philosophy, knowledge,
culture, art, are only good and great as they lead to
a vaster fellowship. By that test alone we can dis-
miss the superman, all sectarian religion, whether
inside or outside the Catholic fold, pantheism, and
many other cults from which the human values have
been omitted.

Bernard Shaw has rightly coupled altruism and
rationalism. In giving the precedence of duty to
self to duty to neighbour, he may be right also, and
therefore advanced as he Ukes to think; but his
gospel of egoism is none the less sectarian. He and
his gospel are in the limelight for our instruction,
and we should be churlish not to be grateful to him
for making clear what are the permanent values of
duty to self. Duty to self is neither selfishness nor
individualism, because as we have seen it involves
the willing and working for a better social order,
while it serves to that end by a passionate faithful-
ness to the Real Self which Christianity and Judaism
have ever held to be made in the image of God.
Only by duty to self can passion, power and
inspiration come into a man's work and give it a
lasting value.

Once we have studied man's detached duties to
God, neighbour and self, we must forget our analysis
and remember that these three duties are one and

THE SAINTS OF THE FUTURE 201

co-terminate. Man can only find himself as he gives
himself to God. These two realizations are simul-
taneous and involve one's neighbour. When we
grasp the three-fold truth we have ceased to be
sectarian and advanced, we hold the timeless truth
which gives us a right to the name catholic. Those
things which the sectarians threatened to rob us of,
mystery, romance, glamour, miracle, are given back
to us, and life becomes once more an adventure and
an enchantment, and we go forth sword in hand,
in love and laughter finding a God in every man,
an angel in every bush, a fairy in every flower.

The Shavian superman outstrips the Nietzschean,
but both have been surpassed by Blake's Real Man,
which was confessedly an interpretation of Jesus
Christ It is time to abandon altogether the alluring
idea of superman as being less than man, and to
give our whole attention to Jesus Christ in order to
discover the unplumbed depths that lie in man and
what are his infinite possibilities. But first I would
say a few words about Blake's system which he said
he must build lest he be enslaved to another's.

Blake had no genius for system building. His
genius was vision, and while he compelled all things
to embody his vision, he had little of that reason
whose province it is to build a coherent system. The
system he ultimately built was not unlike that of
Catholicism, but much inferior to it whether in its
AngUcan or Roman form.

202 VISION AND VESTURE

Blake was so much on the immanentist side as
to deserve the name pantheist. His pantheism arose
from identifpng the Real Man with God. This led
to the doctrine of the relativity of morals and his
repeated asseverations that whatsoever hves is holy.
Blake was careless of consistency and did not pro-
bably follow the worst imphcations of his doctrine,
which can be studied by us in Zarathustra's un-
equivocal utterances. The modern notion of the
absolute relativity of good and evil is a flimsy
foundation for the religious Hfe; while the old con-
ception of an eternal right which gave strength and
dignity to the moral life appeared to be contradicted
by the fact that there is one law to the lion, another
to the ox; one to the child, another to the man;
that even for man there is no invariable law of good
and evil, that the best men are law breakers.

The truth is that deeds have no intrinsic merits,
and cannot of themselves be CEilled good or evil.
Deeds are good or evil according to circumstance,
and therefore it is impossible in the nature of things
that a code of morals can be drawn up which shall
be fitting for all ages and all men The command-
ments must be reduced to one, at the most two, if
they are to approximate to an eternal law. Christ
sums up the decalogue by two — Love to God and
love to one's neighbour. Deeds are good and evil
only as they are signs of obedience or disobedience
to God's will. As man's knowledge of God's will

THE SAINTS OF THE FUTURE 203

grows with the ages, the Saint with the fullest in-
sight obeys God's will and breaks the law. Thus
Jesus gave Himself in love to God. God's will was
the inner law of His Spirit. By obeying impulsively
and instinctively this will, He obeyed the eternal
law of good, and broke every conceivable code of
morals, ran counter to the traditions and con-
ventions of man, and set aside all authority.

Obedience to God's will, then, is the eternal law
of righteousness; and it will manifest itself in deeds
which though good must often appear evil to men
who are spiritually d5dng or dead.

Blake's other inference, " Whatsoever lives is
holy," is not invariably true. Whatsoever lives is
autonomous, and therefore capable of growing apart
from Him who gave it life. Man who received in
fullest measure the breath of life from God, can
stray furthest from Him, and do the most evil.
When in his divine restlessness, he at last returns
to God, he then attains the highest life because it
is the result of choice. Even a vegetable can grow
contrary to God's will, because it is alive, and life
includes will and choice.

But Blake did not follow pantheistic implications
to the egotistic extreme of the modern superman.
He conceives that he must give himself to the God-
life pulsing in him, and his self-donation places him
on the side of Catholicism.

Blake's doctrine of outline, again, delivers him

204 VISION AND VESTURE

from the excesses of pantheism. For him, the seem-
ing outline of the world which is but a vegetable
mirror, is a reflection of the City of God which hath
foundations. The modern vapid talk of heaven
being a state and not a place is merely the
rebound from a materialistic view of heaven. Our
idea of place is supplied by the material universe,
whose apparent substantiality is a reflex of the
real substantiality of heaven. Blake's doctrine
unifies his religion and his art since he followed
the Florentine tradition that good drawing is the
foundation of good art, but it needs to be co-
ordinated with other truths, else it leads to the
negation of the great Venetians, of Rubens, of Rem-
brandt, and of modern impressionism, and the loss
of these would be too dreadful for us to contemplate.
Yet the idea, taken by itself, is magnificent, and
helped to keep Blake sane. His couplet :

God appears and God is light

To those poor souls who dwell in night

is a scathing denunciation of our modern nebulous
immanentism. The next gives us the truth which
should be our deliverance:

But doth a human form display

To those who dwell in realms of day.

We have said thus much to show that Blake
could not found a Church, or build a system, nor
can we accept him as a teacher without qualifica-
tion.

THE SAINTS OF THE FUTURE 205

Our chief concern with him is to find out what
he has passionately affirmed. He has affirmed the
marriage of heaven and hell, of art and religion, and
in so doing he professed to re-discover the genius
of the great Hebrew Prophets which reached per-
fection in Jesus Christ; and who therefore is the
supreme symbol of the imaginative religious life.

Before all else Blake saw in Jesus the law-breaker.
" I tell you, no virtue can exist without breaking
these ten commandments. Jesus was all virtue, and
acted from impulse, not from rules." It follows that
Jesus was a heretic and antinomian, or in modem
phrase, " beyond good and evil." But as we have
seen His rebeUion was obedience to the higher rule
of God's will.

Blake's full picture of Jesus corrects much of our
early teaching of " Gentle Jesus meek and mild."
There was gentleness and there was mildness, but
gentle Jesus could be very terrible. At those
moments when the inner fire which at once sustained
and consumed Him broke through the calm of His
exterior life His adversaries were struck as by
lightning, and His disciples were dazed by the
splendour of His inner life, which lay so entirely
beyond their ken.

The anti-Christian movement which culminated
in Nietzsche's fanatical attack on Christianity and
Christ has brought to light a startling fact about
Christ Himself. Men of imagination protested

2o6 VISION AND VESTURE

against the ecclesiastical type of over-disciplined
man. The man who lived by strict rule, and severely
repressed his natural impulses, imputing them to
the devil, ended by becoming much less than a man
— bigoted, fanatical, harsh, and relentless to all
natural men and heretics. The evangeHcal who
was assured of his salvation and separated himself
from the world and all sinners, developed the same
qualities, and without knowing it, displayed the
same temper as the pharisee of old. Many of Rome's
approved Saints sacrificed half their nature to over-
develop the visionary side, and became quite unfit
for the simple duties of everyday Ufe. There was
something ugly and repellent in the strongly in-
dividualised products of earnest Christian devotion
which was easily detected by the man of imagina-
tion; and he hastily concluded that it was learnt
from the Master whom all Christians professed to
worship. There have been thousands of men and
women in the last eighty years brought up in strict
Christian doctrines who on coming of age have
shaken themselves free, and felt that they could
breathe for the first time. A new ideal was gradu-
ally evolved which grew into Nietzsche's superman;
and the choice was offered to men — Dionysus or
Christ. Such a choice requires closest scrutiny of
the types. Superman represented hfe, instinct,
impulse, imagination, and will; Christ? The
negation of aU these? By no manner of means.

THE SAINTS OF THE FUTURE 207

Christ is the supreme example of life, instinct,
impulse, imagination, and will, and some other
things, lacking which superman goes mad, Christ's
life was one long conflict against various forms of
the religious life which can all be paralleled in the
various modern churches. The modern drama of
the conflict between men of imagination and pro-
fessing Christians is a faint reflex of the supreme
drama when the God-anointed Man fought against
His professing servants and sealed His valiant fight
by His blood. Everything of value for which super-
man has striven is found in Christ, and so once again
the vital question for the age is the same as of old:
What think ye of Christ?

Tennyson called on the bells while ringing out the
old and ringing in the new to " ring in the Christ
that is to be." Since then there has been much talk
of " the Christ to be." It is a loose manner of speak-
ing, for in the nature of things there can never be
another Christ.

The first conception of the Messiah formed itself
very slowly in the minds of Israel's most lofty
prophets. It was fostered by Israel's bitter experi-
ence in times of exile. It grew with the people and
became the symbol into which it poured its deepest
will, hopes, desires, and aspirations. The history
of the Hebrews is unique among the peoples of the
world, and therefore the symbol which embodies
their deepest genius is unique also. But it does not

2o8 VISION AND VESTURE

stop there. When Jesus of Nazareth came to the
consciousness of His Messianic caUing in Jordan's
waters the national symbol began its last refining
process, and it evolved in the mind of Jesus as He
lived through the impassioned and unique days of
His public ministry. Jesus recreated the national
symbol, and in so doing broke down national
exclusiveness. The symbol was not apart from
Himself but became Himself. And so the Man Jesus
Christ could stand up in the majesty of His man-
hood and invite all men to come unto Him, and in
simple sublime egotism declare Himself the Way,
the Truth, and the Life. The Messianic call was
God's unique call. The world has had many
prophets, and priests and kings, many seers, apostles
and poets; it has one Christ.

And what is our hope of the future? " Otir finest
hope is finest memory," and as we review the past,
we see that from time to time men arise who call
themselves the followers of Jesus Christ, and who
not only recover the blurred image of Christ, but
also unveil something more of the Divine Nature.
Such men used to be called Saints, and with this
precedent, we may look forward to the Saint of the
future for whom is ready a great work.

What is a Saint ?

To be like Christ has been the goal of the Saint.
There have been two methods — limitation and trans-
formation. The first has produced the exquisite

THE SAINTS OF THE FUTURE 209

type of monastic Christianity seen in Thomas k
Kempis. Though refreshing and marvellously help-
ful to young people at a certain phase, it is not
robust and virile, or the testimony of one who has
fought in the forefront of the hottest battle. It
does not add to our knowledge of God, or touch the
problems that arise in a complex civilisation.

The other method, transformation, seeks Christ-
likeness by a new Hfe process. Starting with the
new birth of the Spirit it seeks to develop the
Spirit of Life, by 5delding to it and allowing it to
transform it into the Christ-image. This is the real
method for training Saints, the Saint produced being
essentially a life product. When a Man follows
fearlessly the Spirit of Life, he draws his first
nourishment from the past, and for a long time there
is nothing to mark him out from any particular
past type. But there comes a time when the past
having been assimilated fails him, and there is
either an arrest in his development, or he must
start on the real business of creating new values.
This is the highest and most difficult task on which
a man can venture, and he must be called to it,
otherwise he will most certainly fall into the abyss.
Hitherto he has grown in favour with God and man,
now he is diverging from man's standards, and
whereas he was admired, now he is resisted. The
resistance will show what manner of man he is —
whether he resents it or forgives it. If pride pos-

o

2IO VISION AND VESTURE

sesses him he will not resent but disdain the opposi-
tion and go the way of superman. If he is humble
he will forgive and keep his spirit sweet, and go the
way of Christ. His greatest trial is to be told by
" good " people that he is quite wrong, for his
himiOity will dictate submission, yet the moment he
mistrusts his spiritual instincts he is plunged into
darkness. He has one great consolation. The same
thing happened to Jesus Christ, and he finds in the
Gospel the very words he wants, such as " things
new and old," " new bottles " and " old bottles,''
" new wine " and " old wine," " new cloth " and
" old cloth," and a word shedding immense light,
that while the Christ created new values. He
declared: " Think not that I am come to destroy,
I am come to fulfil." For the full rich message of
the Master preserves the old in a new combination.
Henceforth he finds himself on the side of Christ
against those who call themselves by the name of
Christ. His hfe is now out in the open seas battling
with the waves, and he will not " swim to shore with
a worship of shore." ^ A still greater difficulty lies
ahead, and one that will demand his utmost valoxir
and courage. Hitherto the map of Christ's hfe has
guided him, but he soon finds that a host of questions
arise, questions of life and conduct which can no
longer be decided in the old easy way of following
precedent, because they are different to those faced

' Modern Lov».

THE SAINTS OF THE FUTURE 211

by Christ; and his only way is to do what Christ
did, follow the Spirit of life within feariessly and
go forward whithersoever it may lead. The dark-
ness and conflict here may be terrible. Christ on
the Cross doubted Himself and thought for a
moment that His opposers might be right, and He
cried out of His bitter desolation, " My God, my God,
why hast thou forsaken me? " But the darkness
passed; He knew He had fulfilled His calling,
and calmly committed His spirit into the Father's
Hands. If the Saint passes through this ordeal, he
becomes a creator, he stands at the beginning of a
new age, he attains to fruitfulness and begets a
thousand children in his hkeness, he unveils to his
age a new feature of the Divine Face.

A Saint, then, is one who fulfils all past values by
transvaluing them; who creates new values; who
is at one with God and himself; at war with his
relations and neighbours; who yet conceives it his
highest privilege to serve them, and whose love for
them is bounded only by their receptivity, who
gives to his age a deeper understanding of the mind
of God.

It is clear that there will be a strange and miscel-
laneous crowd of candidates to this high honour.
Unsexed spinsters, crazy pastors, half - learned
students, egotistic supermen, fanatical clerks, and
hysterical visionaries will elbow and jostle the saint,

till he may well doubt his high calling and think

o 2

212 VISION AND VESTURE

perhaps that he is only one of them. Yet the Saint
to be can never be as lonely as was Christ. He will be
one of an army taking possession of the promised
land, and he will utter healing words of nuld
wisdom in arresting contrast to the words of the
supermen who have put themselves in the place
of God.

We are now in a position to see what are the past
values that the Saint must conserve. It is absurd,
of course, to imagine that one man in himself can
be an entire epitome of the past. Only a Church that
reaches into the far past can be such a depository;
and therefore to fulfil the past the Saint must belong
to a Body with a Great Memory. He wUl draw from
this Great Memory unconsciously, and when he
wills; and it will serve to correct any erring bias in
his own mind. Yet every Saint is a rebel. Christ
died for resisting the institution that had nourished
Him. The Saint is ever a heretic in the eyes of
authority; and he is bound to face the question
whether he will separate himself from the Church
and start a new family. That is the easiest course
to pursue, but it entails much loss because it cuts
him off from the Church's Memory. Christ followed
the heroic course of remaining in the institution
where He was in colhsion with authority every
instant. His conformity involved bitter conflict, but
it resulted in transforming Judaism. Instead of
Christianity being an entirely new institution late

THE SAINTS OF THE FUTURE 213

in the world's history, it was transformed Judaism
carrying in its veins the survival values of Judaism
which before had carried within the rich contribu-
tions of Egyptian, Babylonian and Assyrian thought.
The Saint of the future, then, will belong to an
institution which is Unked to the Apostolic Church
and holds the richest tradition of the past values of
many nations.

It follows that he will advocate organised religion.
He will uphold as many sacraments as possible.
He will defend Bishops, Priests and Deacons.

While adhering to the historical Church, he will
startle the orthodox by his new values, especially
moral values. Things which the orthodox hold as
rigidly as the pharisees held to the law of the
sabbath, he will overlook; and he will utter the
right word on a host of matters now lying in hopeless
confusion and reprobation. Qualities formerly
attributed to hell will receive fresh beauty in him,
for in his soul heaven and hell will be married; the
beauty of his holiness will be the harmony of his
parts. He will be filled with the Holy Spirit of
Imagination. Imagination will unite in him Heaven,
Earth, and Hell. Himself the creature of life, in-
stinct, impulse, and imagination, he will draw a
multitude because of the beauty of his life. And he
will beget a multitude, for when he is ripe to create
new values, he is also strong to beget a spiritual
progeny. And therefore we may hope that Calvary

214 VISION AND VESTURE

will not be repeated. It was prophesied of old,
" He shall see of the travaU of His Soul, and shall
be satisfied." In the world drama Calvary comes
in the third act, and the Communion of Saints in
the fifth. The Saints have been disciphned by
suffering, they must now be perfected by joy.
Since the day for solitary saints has passed, we may
look for the day when they shall spring up in all
parts of the earth, and as each Saint is father of a
spiritual family, a Community of Saints becomes
possible, to which each Saint contributes his touch
of intense colour, his line of beauty, and so helps
to create the eternal pattern which has been God's
dream through the ages.

We have been assured repeatedly that the age
of miracles is past. The age of miracles is to come.
The Catholic Church defends the miraculous as
evidence of God's free will. The Saints are those
whose wills have become free through redemption.
The moment the will is reaUy free it accomplishes
acts which on this material plane can only be called
miraculous. The deeds of the Saints will be marvel-
lous, mysterious, beautiful. There will be no need
to turn to art or religion, knowledge or culture, or to
tales of genies and enchantment, fairies and gnomes
to escape from the sordid realities of life; in the
Community of Saints where there is abundance of
Ufe, it will be found that Ufe itself contains all
mystery and enchantment; and in an ever more

THE SAINTS OF THE FUTURE 215

passionate yea to life, man will find that the dreams
of his childhood were foreshadowings of reality, and
that as with clear open vision he comes into the
heart of Reality, love to God, love to man, and love
to self will transfigure all things, and turn the
waters of life into the wine of eternity.

' The Spiritual Man is Mad."

HOSEA.

INDEX

Abraham, 8i

Adam, 62

A. E., 24, 162

^schylus, 125

" Aillinn," 160

Akashic Records, 28, 173

Akosmism, 142

Albion, 61, 77

Alchemists, 30

Alexandria, S. Clement of, 6

Alexandrian Platonism, 4

Allamanda, 49

Altar of God, 94

Alter, cult of the, 199

Altruism, 159, 199, 200

Anactoria, 134

Anarchy, 145

Anatomy, 172

Ancient of Days, 56, 99

Angelico, Fra, 107

Anselm, S., 141

Aonian Mount, 36

Apocalyptic imagery, 170, 192

Apostles' Creed, 188-191

Apostles' Ministry, 83

Apostolic Church, 213

Appearances of the risen

Christ, 190
Aquinas, S. Thomas, 83, 85,

124, 141
Aristotle, 124, 140
Arminian Doctrine, 80
Arnold, Matthew, 124-126, 128,

156, 185
Art, 9, 10, II, 53, 54, 55-59,

108, 109, 165, 187, 200, 214
Art and Religion, 107, 118
Artist, the, 161, 164, 175
Artist's calling, 161
Ascension, 94, 185, 190
Ascension Day, 109

Asceticism, 32

Assyria, 51

Atheism, 92, 172

Atonement, 70, 71, y^, 93, 94,

185, 189
Augustine, S., 6, 44, 45
Authority, 203

Babel, 152

Babylon, 50

Bacon, Francis, 65

Baptism, 4, 5, 83

Baptism of Fire, 83, 185

Baptism of Jesus Christ, 14, 173

Baptists, 5

Battersea, 50, 51

Baudelaire, 132

Beauty, 160, 161

Beauty of God, 165

Beauty's Face, 159

Becoming, 158

Beethoven, 55

Being, 158

Bergson, 114, 146

Besant, Mrs. Annie, 171, 173

Bethel, 50

Beveridge, 68

" Beyond Good and Evil," 205

Bible, the, 179, 183, 184, 187-
188

Bishops, 123, 213

Blake, William, and Art, 53-
59; his doctrine of con-
traries, 66, 178; his doctrine
of outline, 203; on election,
42-45 ; his great affirmation,
205 ; his Day of Judgment,
85-99; Blake and Hell, 42;
Blake's Lyrics, 58; his
marriage, 31; Blake and
Michael Angelo, 55, 56; on

217

2l8

VISION AND VESTURE

the natural man, 6; Blake
and Nature, 22-25; Blake
and Place, 50-51; his Pro-
phetical Books, 104; filake's
Real Man, 15, 201 ; his read-
ing of Christ's Life, 40, 41;
Blake and Shakespeare, 16,
17; Blake and Shaw, 153-
155; Blake and Yeats, 156;
Blake and Spiritualism, 27;
Blake's spirit, 160; his
symbolism, 46-52; his
system, 201; his use of
imagination, 16; Blake and
Vision, 20, 21; Blake and
Walt Whitman, 58-59; see
7, 8, 135, 138, 144, 156, 163,
165, 170, 171, 173, 174, 176

Blanco Posnet, 147

Blank verse, 58

Blavatsky, Madame, 172

Body and Soul, 129, 132

Body, natural, 181-182

Body, sensitive, 50, 51

Body, spiritual, 181 -182

Body, the, 178-182; its form,
beauty, and fragrance, 182

Boehme, Jacob, 6, 19, 30, 69,
84, no, 120, 174

Bognor, 98

Borgia, Caesar, in, 154

Bowlahoola, 49

Bradlaugh, 172

Brethren, Plymouth, s

Broad Church, i66, 168

Broken Love, 31

" Bromion," 49

Bronte, Charlotte, 128

Bronte, Emily, 128, 136

Brothels, 35, 154

Browning, Robert, 128

Bruges, 14

Buddha, 116- 117

Buddhism, 103, 109, 116, 117,
128

Bunyan, John, 84, 85, 113,
144, 148-149

Butler, Samuel, 42, 44, 114,
144, 146, 180, 185

Caesar, 106

Cagliostro, 21

Caiaphas, 56

Calamus, 136

Calvary, 213, 214

Calvert, Edward, 57

Calvin, 5, 44

Calvinism, 79

Calvinists, 6, 70

Campbell, Rev. R. J., 169

Canterbury, 50, 51

Canterbury Pilgrims, 39

Capitalist system, 198

Carlyle, Thomas, 126, 128, 136,

185, 186
Catherine, S., of Siena, 19
Catholic and Apostolic Church,

181
Catholic Church, 6, 29, 214
Catholic faith, 124
Catholicism, 4, 19, 185, 186,

203
Catholic mystics, 6
Catholic theology, 175
Celtic mysticism, 159
Celtic mythology, 158
Chelsea, 50, 51
Chesterton, G., 149, 150
Children, 7
Children's rights, 147
Chopin, 115
Christ-image, 209
Christ to be, 193
Christian altar, 136
Christian dogmas, 157
Christian faith, 192
Christian morais, 157
Christian perfection, 80
Christian revelation, 124
Christian Science, 142, 174-

176, 177
Christiamty, 103, 104, 107, 108-

109, 116, 117, 118, 132-133,

139, 141, 168, 172, 183, 185,

200, 205
Christianity, monkish, 160
Christmas, 57, 190
Church, Anglican, 5, 167, 168,

178

INDEX

219

Church, Catholic, 6, 29, 214

Church, Greek, 5

Church, the, 94, 162, 186, 171,

212

Church militant, 191

Church of England, 167, 168,

178
Church of Rome, 5, igi
City of God, 73, 204
Clare, S., 38
Classicism, 19
Coleridge, 126, 136
Comedy, human, 198
Comic spirit, 131, ig6
Communion of Saints, 100, 191,

195. 214
Comte, Auguste, 127, 146, 180
Conchubar, 160
Confirmation, 83
Consecration of Churches, 5 1
Conservation of energy, 179
Conversion, 4, 5
Corporeal friends, 73
Creation of Adam, 56
Creator and Creature, 177
Creeds, the, 186, 187
Criticism, 125, 170, 183, 184,

185, 186
Cromek, 37, 39
Cromwell, Oliver, 46
Cuchulain of Muirthemne, 160
Culture, 125, 200, 214
Curates, 147

Daniel, 19, 26
Daniel Deronda, 199
Dante, 19, 106, 120
Dark night of the Soul, 85
Darwin, 151, 156
Darwinism, 114, 149
David, 14

Day of Judgment, 85-99
Day of Pentecost, 83
Deacons, 213
Decalogue, 13, 48, 202
" Deirdre," 160
Deism, 3
Democracies, 115
De Quincey, 27

Devil's Disciple, 147, 148

Dickinson, Lowes, 193

Dionysus, 115, 206

Dividends, 146

Divine Humanity, 98, 133

Doctors' Dilemma, 147

Dogma, 123, 157, 185, 186, 187

Dolores, 134

Doukhoborski, 145

Dover Beach, 125

Dowden, Edward, 59

Drama, 165

Dream of Gerontius, 137

Dreams of childhood, 215

Dualism, 174, 178

Diirer, Albert, 13, 54

Duty to God, 200-201

Duty to neighbour, 199-201

Duty to self, 200

Earth, III, 129, 130, 131, 132,
159, 162, 213

Easter, 190

Ecce Homo, 106

Ecclesiastical type, 206

Ecclesiastical year, 190

Economics, 172

Eddy, Mrs., 174, 175, 177

Edinburgh, 50

Ego, the, 157

Ego, cult of, 199

Egoism, gospel of, 200

Egypt, 4. 19, SO

Election, 42-45, 115

Electrons, 177

Elijah, 18 1

Eliot, George, 9, 65, 112, 126-
127, 128, 130, 131, 137, 141,
156, 157, 180, 185, 199, 200

EUis, 31, 139

" Emer," 160

Enchantment, 214

English Church, 122, 123

Enoch, 181

Entuthon Benython, 49

Erotion, 134

Esoteric Christianity, 172

Eternal, the, 173

Eternallawof righteousness,203

220

VISION AND VESTURE

Eternal Life, 117, 175, i8i, 199
Eternal Man, 25
Eternal pattern, 214
Eternal recurrence, no
Evangelicals, 69, 113
Evangelical movement, 68, 122
Everlasting Gospel, 29, 37-41,

60, 105
Everlasting punishment, 185
Evolution, 114, 146
Evolution, creative, 114
Eucken, 158
Ezekiel, 10, 13, 19, 26, 56, 82,

99. 137

Face of Christ, 104

Faith, the, 30

False ideals, 1 50

Fanny's First Play, 147

Faustine, 134

Fellowship, 191, 200

Felpham, 37, 97, 98

Fenelon, 20

Ficte, no

Fielding, 71

" Findabair," 160

Fletcher of Madeley, 41, 68

Fleurs du Mai, 132

Florentine art, 19

Florentines, 57

Fludd, 19

Forgiveness of sins, 164

Form, 123

Four Zoas, 61, 63, 85, 156

Fox, George, 19, 84

Francis, S., of Assisi, 38, 154

French Revolution, 172

Gauguin, 55

Gautier, 137

Genius, Poetic, 10, 11, 12, 13

German music, 9

Gichtel, no

Giotto, 107

Gladstone, 123

Glamour, 201

Gnosticism, 173

God, 60, IIS, 150. 160. 198

God and Man, 60-105

Goethe, i, io6, 108, 109, 118,
124, 125, 126, 128, 155, 158,
187

Good Friday, 190

Gore, Bishop, 167

Goshen, 51

Gospel of the Kingdom, 170

Gothic Architecture, 19

Grace Abounding, 84

" Grandcourt," 157

Greek Church, 145

Greek Fathers, 140

Greeks, 132, 134

Gregory, Lady, 160, 162

Guild of Health, 178

Guyon, Madame, 20

Hampstead, 51

Hardy, Thomas, 129, 131, 185

Harlot, 35

Hayley, 37

Healing forces in nature, 177

Healing of the body, 178

Hebrew Uterature, 9

Hebrew music, 9

Hebrew poetry, 9

Hebrew prophets, 53, 170, 205

Hell, 47

Heraclitus, 115

Hering, Professor, of Prague,

114
Hermaphroditus, 134, 135
Hertha, Teutonic Goddess of

Earth, 141
Hervey, 68
High Church, 122
Higher Criticism, 104
Higher Critics, 166, 183, 187,

191, 192
Higher Thought, 182
Highgate, 51
Historical Church, 213
Historical element in the

Creeds, 187
Hogarth, 14, 44, 144, 147-148
Holland, Canon Scott, 167
Holy Catholic Church, 122
Horeb, 80
Hiigel, Baron von, 168

INDEX

221

Hugo, Victor, 136

Human joys and sorrows, 196

Hypnotism, 174

Ibsen, III, 118, 144, 149-150,

IS7
Idealists, 157
Ignatius, S., 6
Image of Christ, 104
Imagination, 9-15, 99, 158, 170,

171, 177, 178, 206, 207, 213
Imaginative Reason, 156
Imaginative religious life, 205
Immanence, 139-142, 204
Immortality, 178-182
Immortality, subjective, 180
Impressionism, 204
Impressionists, 55
Impulse, 45, 206, 207, 213
Incarnation, the, 94, 189
Industrial Revolution, 143
Infallibility of the Pope, the

Book, the Church, 185
Inspiration, 94, 200
Instinct, 198, 206, 207, 213
Instinct of Place, 50-52
India, 4

Isaiah, 9, 13, 19, 26, 51, 82
Islam, 124
Italian humanists, 1 1 1

Jacob, 82

Jacob's Ladder, 56

Jansenism, 126

Jehudah ha Levi, 127

Jeremiah, 10, 44

Jerusalem, 31, 51, 52, 63, 64,

77. 139

Jesuitism, 142

Jesus Christ, 13, 14, 18, 19, 29,
39, 40. 44. 45. 47. 54. 60, 61,
77, 80, 103, III, 112, 113,
116, 117, 140, 161, 170, 171,
179, 181, 183, 188, 189, 190,
191, 192, 193, 196, 201, 203,
205, 206, 207, 208, 210, 212

Jews, the, 9, 29, 51

Joan of Arc, 44

Job, 28, 56, 72, 73, 75, 82, 99

John, S., Apostle and Evan-
gelist, 13, 19, 24, 26, 61, 192

John, S., Gospel according to,
3, 6, 85, 140

John, S., of the Cross, 83, 85

John, S., the Baptist, 32, 33, 76

John Bull's Other Island, 151

Jordaja, 83

Joy, 214

Judah, 51

Judaism, 13, 124, 127, 169,
200, 212, 213

Jude the Obscure, 129

Judgment, 85-99, 173

Justin Martyr, 6, 140

Kant, no, 112
Keats, 126, 136
Keble, 122

Kierkegaard, 118-119
Kingdom of Heaven, in, 116,

140, 145, 158, 192
Kingsley, Charles, 123, 128
Knowledge, 200, 214
Knowledge of God, 181

Land of Heart's Desire, 160-161

Latin Church, 141

Laughter, 155

Law, 161, 162

Law, William, 6, 53, 69

Law-breakers, 146, 205

" Lazarus," 61

Lead, Jane, 6

Le Bon, Dr., 177

Leonardo da Vinci, 107

Leopardi, 129

Letter, the, 187

Levi, Eliphas, 30

Liberal Catholics, 184

Liberty of body and mind, 15,

131
Life, 165, 192
Life-force, 150, 151, 198
Liimell, J., 57
Literature, 164, 165
Literature of Holiness, 84
Locke, John, 62, 65
Lodge, Oliver, Sir, 177

222

VISION AND VESTURE

Loisy, 1 68

London, 50

Lord of Hosts, 177

" Los," 47, 48, 49. 127, 156

Los' Halls, 26-30, 40, i6o, 163,

173
Low Church, 122
Luther, Martin, 46, 107
" Luvah," 47, 48, 49, 90, 91
Lux Mundi, 167

" Maeve," 160

Magic, 164

Magician, 58

Magician, Egyptian, 30

Manet, 55

Marriage of art and religion, 205

Marriage of Heaven and Hell,

9, 10, 118, 156, 182
" Martin Hearne," 162
" Mary Magdalene," 34-35
Matter, 174, 175, 176, 177
Matter, indestructibility of , 179
Matthews, Mr., 38
Maurice, F. D., 128, 167, i68
Medical science, 175
Memory, Great, 28, 160, 163,

164, 165, 212
Mental fight, 163
Mental science, 176-178, 182
Meredith, George, 129-131, 132,

151. 185
Merimee, Prosper, 11 1
Messiah, the, 192, 207
Messiah's Table, 99
Messianic Banquet, 192
Messianic Calling, 208
Messianic Idea, 189
Methodists, 69, 70
Michael Angelo, 13, 35, 46, 54,

SS, 56, 107, 172
Middle Ages, 124, 127
Mill, John Stuart, 156
Milton, John, 45, 46, 47
Mind, 17s
Miracles, 201, 214
Moberley, R. A., 167
Modernism, 29, 129, 169, 182
Modernists, 168, 186-187

Modern mind, 125, 156
Modern movement, 166
Modern religious movement,

166-182
Modern thinkers, 177
Modern thought, 95, 182
Monet, 55
Monte Carlo, 97
Morals, absolute, 112
Morals, Christian, 185
" Mordecai," 199
Morris, 155
" Mortal mind," 175
Moses, 82, 127
Municipal trading, 146
Mystery, 86, 201, 214
Mystic, the, 18, 19, no, 158
Mystic Imagination, 143
Mysticism, 158, 182
Mysticism, Blake's, 171
Mysticism, Celtic, 159-160
Mysticism, German, no, 112
Mystics, Catholic, 113
Mystics, Celtic, 29
Mystics, Hindoo, 24
Mystics, Protestant, 191

Nativity, the, 56, 57
Nature, 22-25
Nature, cruelties of, 23
Natural man, 133
Natural religion, 3, 11, 87
Natural religious man, 66-76
Nebuchadnezzar, 56
Neo-mystic, 183
Neo-pagans, 139, 183
Neo-pagan ideal, 193
Newman, J. H., 123-124, 137,

142
New Testament, 83
New Theology, 169, 182
Newton, Isaac, 65
Nicodemus, 76
Nietzsche, 43, 103, 104, 106-

119, 13s. 141. 144. 151-152.

15s. "^S?. 195. 205
Nietzschean, the, 152
Nietzschean superman, 183,

195-197

INDEX

223

Nietzsche's influence, 106
Nineteenth century, 107-121,

122-142, 157
Nominalism, 94
Nonconformists, 169
Non-resistance, 145
Novalis, no

" Oisin," 160

" Ore," 89, 90, 91

Order of the Star in the East,

193. 194
Origen, 6
Oxford Movement, 122-123,

136, 167

Paganism, 129, 132, 133, 139,

173
" Palamabron," 49 ^

Palestine, 50
Palmer, Samuel, 57
Pantheism, 125, 126, 127, 141,

174, 177, 198, 200, 202, 204
Paracelsus, 19, 120
Party Spirit, 161
Pascendi Gregis, 169
Passion, 102, 108
Patrick, S., 160
Patriotism, 141
Paul, S., 4, 6, 13, 14, 15, i8, 19,

20, 22, 30, 44, 45, 48, 62, 139
Peniel, 50

Person of Christ, 104
Pessimism, 128-129, 196
Peter, S., of Alcantara, 38, 83
Petronius, in
Pharisaism, 11

Pharisees, 13, 14, 34, 161, 213
Philistia, 50
Philo, 4

Philosophy, 165, 200
Pietism, 118, 131
Pindar, 125
Plato, 140

Poems and Ballads, 132, 134
Polemic, theologicaJ, 166
Polycarp, S., 6
Pope Angelico, 183, 193

Pope Pius X., 169
Positivism, 158, 110-112
Positivist hymn, 180
Post-impressionists, 55
Post-modernism, 182
Poulain, 83
Predestination, 42-45
Pre-Raphaelites, 55
Presbyterians, 5
Priests, 213

Primitive Methodists, 169
Prisons, 154
Promethean legend, 153
Prophecies of Blake, 60
Protestantism, 4, 10, 11, 83,

108, 184, 185
Proverbs of Hell, 138, 153
Puritanism, 19
Purleigh, 145
Pusey, Dr., 122, 167

Quakers, 6, 169, 189
Quietism, 20

Raphael, 13, 54

Rationalism, 3, 157, 158, 179,

200
Rationalists, 156
Reade, Charles, 137
Realism, in, 148, 149
Reality, 51, 151, 158, 215
Real Man, 14, 16, 36, 38, 42,

47. 48, S3, 60, 61, 62, 65, 79,

99-103, 138, 178, 181, 183,

201, 202
Real Self, 154, 157, 200
Real Worid, 54
Reason, 127

Reasoning power, 64, 65
Redemption of Hell, 118
Regeneration, 3, n, 157, 173,

189, 190
Reincarnation, 171
Relativity of good and evil, 202
Relativity of morals, 117
Religion, g, 10, 11, 14, 35, 65,

160, 165, 187, 199, 200, 214
Religion and art, 204
Religion, organised, 213

224

VISION AND VESTURE

Religious genius, 192

Rembrandt, 54, 55, 204

Renan, 183, 184

Renascence, 107

Renascence, Italian, 11

Rent, law of, 146

Resentment, 195

Resurrection, 94, 185, 190, 195

Return of the Native, 129

Revolution, 75

Reynolds, Sir Joshua, 54

Rhythm, 58, 59

Richmond, George, 57

" Rintrah," 49

Ritual, 123

River of Life, 56, 57

Robertson of Brighton, 167

Rock of Ages, 10

Rodin, 57

Roeckelian Socialism, 46

Romaine, 68

Roman Catholic Church, 123,

124, 168, 186, 187
Romance, 151, 199, 201
" Rosamond," 157
Rose, Inviolate, 159-160, 162
Rosicrucians, 30
Rosmini, 6

Rossetti, Christina, 137
Rousseau, 65
Rubens, 54, 55, 204
Ruskin, 128
Russell, Archibald, 139
Rutherford, Samuel, 5
Ruysbroeck, 6

Sacrament of Unction, 178
Sacraments, 51, 122, 213
Saints, 34, 115, 151-153, 161,

178, 193, 203, 208, 2n, 212,

213, 214
Saints of the Future, 183-215-
Saint Sulpice, 184
Samhain, 165
Sancti&cation, 80, 189
Sappho, 132, 137
Sartor Resartus, 186
" Satan," 63, 66
Savonarola, 107

Scandinavian mjrthology, 46
" Scholfield," 31
Schoolmen, 140
Schopenhauer, i, 46, 103, 108-

109, no, 114, 128-129, 144
Science, 158, 179
Science and Health, ly^, 177
Scribes, 161

Scriptures, Old Testament, 81
Self, duty to, 157, 200
Selfishness, value of, 117
Self-oblation, loi, 191
Self, real, 157
Self-realisation, 95, 127
Self-respect, 147, 198
Senses, 130
Sentimentalism, 151
Sermon on the Mount, 113, 145
Sex and Holiness, 30-36
Sexual instinct, 132, 134-136
Shakespeare, 16, 17, 44, 55, 106,

120, 164
Shareholders, 146
Shavian superman, 152, 183,

197-201
Shaw, Bernard, 143-155, 172,

177. 185. 198. 197. 200
Shelley, 126, 136, 141, 155
Sidhe, the, 143
Signac, 55
Simonides, 125
Sinai, 13

Social democratic state, 146
Socialised state, 146
Socialism, 115
Social organism, 146, 1 57
Socrates, 140
Solidarity, 197
Song of Solomon, 184
Songs of Innocence, 138
Son of Man, 32, 54, 120, 192
Sophocles, 125
Soul and body, 178-182
SpeBcer, Herbert, 146, 156
Spinoza, 22, 125, 127
Spinsters, 147, 211
Spirit of Christianity, 193
Spirit of Life, 186, 209, 211
Spiritualism, 26, 27

INDEX

225

Stanley, Dean, 167, 172
State, the, 72, 145, 146, 147,

157, 162
Stothard, 39
Strauss, 183, 184
Strindberg, August, 1 18-120
Stroud, 14s
Stylists, French, 165
Superman, 103, 109, 114-116,

141, 143, 151-153, 155, 183,
193, 194, 195-201, 200, 201,
203, 206, 207, 210, 212

Supernaturalism, 151
Suso, Henry, no
Swedenborg, 7, 19, 20, 30, 69,

119, 120
Swift, Jonathan, 144
Swinburne, 58, 131-139, 141,

142, 185
Sword, the, 163
Sword, Christian, 174
Symbols, 18-21, 46-52, 187
Ssrmbols, Christian, 46
Sjrmbols of sex, 135
Symons, Arthur, i, 57
Synge, 29, 162

Tauler, 6, no

Tennyson, 23, 128, 207

Teresa, S., 6, 20, 38

Tersteegen, 6, 130

" Tharmas," 47, 48, 49

Theosophy, 171-174, 175, 177,

182
" Theotormon," 49
Thomas, Apostle, 60
Thomas a Kempis, 209
Thought, Assyrian, Babylonian

and Egyptian, 213
Thus Spake Zarathustra, 106
Titian, 54
"Tito," 157
Toplady, 10, 41

Tolstoi, 54, 1 16, 129, 144, 145,164
Tractarianism, 122, 126
Tractarians, 167
Tradition, 127

Transcendence, 140, 141, 142,
■ 199

Transvaluation of values, 116,

Tree of Knowledge, 47
Tree of Life, 47
Trinity, the, 157
TroUope, Anthony, 137
Twentieth Century, 1 58
Tyrrell, George, 142, 168, 169

Udan Adan, 49
Unction, Sacrament of, 178
Unicorn from the Stars, 162
" Urizen," 47, 48, 49, 65, 86-

89, 127, 156
" Urthona," 49
Utilitarianism, 156, 157
Uzzah, 51

" Vala,'' 90

Van Gogh, 55

Valley of the Shadow of Death,

85, 100
Values, Catholic, 155
Values, mystical, 157
Values, new, 213
Values, Positive, 157
Values, Protestant, 155
VaJues of human deeds, 191,

200
Values of passion, 117, 153
Values of pride, 117
Values of self, in
Values of voluptuousness, 117
Veda, priestly codes of, 106
Venetians, 55, 204
Venn, 68
Verulam, 50
Victorians, 122-142, 156, 164,

199
Virgin Birth, 185, 190
Virgin life, 190
Virgin Mother, 190
Vision, 14, 16-21, 22, 24, 26,

27> 28, S3, 54, 55, 56, 61, 64,

99, 162, 163, 170, 215
Visions of the Daughters of

Albion, 33
Vitalism, 117, 121, 198
Voluptuousness, 117

226

VISION AND VESTURE

Wagner, 46, 114, 151, 155

War, 75, 150

" Warren, Mrs.," 147

Way of all Flesh, 42

Way of Purgation, 85

Wesley, John, 5, 10, 41, 68, 69,

70, 80
Wesleyans, 5

Whete there is Nothing, 162
Whitefield, 5, 10, 68, 70, 78, 80
Whitman, Walt, 58-59, 135-136
Ward, Wilfrid, 124
Wilde, Oscar, 144, 185
Will of God, 13, 39, 41, 202, 203
" Willoughby Patterne, Sir," 95
Will to live, 114

Will to power, 114
Wine of Eternity, 99, 215
Words, rhythm of, 165
Words, value of, 94
Wordsworth, 24
World-mind, 194
World teacher, 183, 193, 194
Worship, 199

Yea to Life, 116, 215
Yeats, W. B., 28, 29, 59, 139,
143. 153. 156-165, 177

" Zarathustra,

197, 202
Zoological Gardens, 22

112, 113, 115,

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