“‘John for disobedience bled;
But you can turn the stones to bread.
God’s high king and God’s high priest
Shall plant their glories in your breast
If Caiaphas you will obey,
If Herod you with bloody prey
Feed with the sacrifice[41] and be
Obedient, fall down, worship me.’
Thunder and lightning broke around
And Jesus’ voice in thunder’s sound;
‘Thus I seize the spiritual prey;
Ye smiters with disease, make way.
I come your King and God to seize;
Is God a smiter with disease?’”
This divine revolt and deliverance of the spiritual human “prey” out of the hands of law and fangs of religion is made matter of accusation against him by the “unredeemable part of the world” of which we spoke—using here as its mouthpiece the “shadowy man” or phantasmal shell of man, which “rolled away” when the times were full “from the limbs of Jesus, to make them his prey”:—
“Crying ‘Crucify this cause of distress
Who don’t keep the secrets of holiness.
All mental powers by diseases we bind:
But he heals the deaf and the dumb and the blind,
Whom God has afflicted for secret ends;
He comforts and heals and calls them friends.’”
But Christ, instead of becoming a prey to it, himself makes his prey of this unclean shadow or ghastly ghost of the bodily life now divided from him—this pestilent nature in bondage to the dæmonic deity, which thought to consume him by dint of death:
“An ever-devouring appetite
Glittering with festering venoms bright;”[42]
puts it off and devours it in three nights; even as now also he feeds upon it to consume it; being made perfect in pride, that he may overcome the body by spiritual and “galling pride:” eat what “never was made for man to eat,” the body of dust and clay, the meal’s meat of the old serpent: as “the white parts or lights” of a plate are “eaten away with aqua-fortis or other acid, leaving prominent” the spiritual “outline” (Life, v. 1, ch. ix., p. 89). This symbol, taken from Blake’s own artistic work of engraving—from the process through which we have with us the Songs and Prophecies—will give with some precision the exact point indicated, and might have been allowed of by himself, as not unacceptable or inapposite.
This final absorption of the destructible body, consumption of “the serpent’s meat,” is but the upshot of a life of divine rebellion and “spiritual war,” not of barren physical qualities and temporal virtues:—
“The God of this world raged in vain;
He bound old Satan in his chain:
Throughout the land he took his course,
And traced diseases to their source:
He cursed the Scribe and Pharisee,
Trampling down hypocrisy.”
His wrath was made as it were a chariot of fire; at the wheels of it was dragged the God of this world, overthrown and howling aloud:—
“Where’er his chariot took its way
Those gates of death let in the day;”