every chain and bar broken down from them, and the staples of the doors loosed; his voice was heard from Zion above the clamour of axle and wheel,
“And in his hand the scourge shone bright;
He scourged the merchant Canaanite
From out the temple of his mind,
And in his body tight does bind
Satan and all his hellish crew;
And thus with wrath he did subdue
The serpent bulk of nature’s dross
Till he had nailed it to the cross.
He put on sin in the Virgin’s womb,
And put it off on the cross and tomb
To be worshipped by the Church of Rome:”
not to speak of other churches. One may notice how to the Pantheist the Catholic’s worship is a worship of sin, even as his own is to the Catholic. “You adore as divine the fallen nature and sinful energies of man:” “you, again, the cast-off body wherein Satan and sin were shut up, that he who assumed it might crucify them.” Sin or false faith or “hypocrisy” was scourged out of the mind into the body, and the separate animal body then delivered over to death with the sins thereof—all the sins of the world garnered up in it to be purged away with fire: and of this body you make your God. The expressed gird at the “Church of Rome” is an interpolation; at first Blake had merely written. “And on the cross he sealed its doom” in place of our two last-quoted lines. Akin to this view of the “body of sin” is his curious heresy of the Conception; reminding one of that Christian sect which would needs worship Judas as the necessary gateway of salvation: for without his sin how could redemption have come about?
“Was Jesus born of a virgin pure
With narrow soul and looks demure?
If he intended to take on sin,
His mother should an harlot (have) been:
Just such a one as Magdalen,
With seven devils in her pen.
Or were Jew virgins still more cursed,
And more sucking devils nursed?”
(This ingenious solution, worthy of any mediæval heresiarch of the wilder sort in a time of leprosy, is also an afterthought. From the sudden anti-Judaic rapture of grotesque faith or humour into which Blake suddenly dips hereabouts, one might imagine he had been lately bitten or stung by some dealer or other such dangerous craftsman of the Hebrew kind; for that any mortal Jew—or for that matter any conceivable Gentile—would have credited him to the amount of a penny sterling, no one will imagine. Let the reader meanwhile endure him a little further, suppressing if he is wise any comment on Blake’s “insanity” or “blasphemous doggrel”; for he should now at least understand that this literal violence of manner, these light or grave audacities of mere form, imply no offensive purpose or significance, except insomuch as offence is inseparable from any strange kind of earnestly heretical belief. Neither is Blake here busied in fetching milk to feed his babes and sucklings. This he could do incomparably well on occasion, with such milk as a nursing-goddess gave to the son of Metaneira; but here he carves meat for men—of a strange quality, tough and crude: but not without savour or sustenance if eaten with the right sauce and prefaced with a proper grace.)
“Or what was it that he took on
That he might bring salvation?
A body subject to be tempted,
From neither pain nor grief exempted,
Or such a body as could not feel
The passions that with sinners deal?
Yes: but they say he never fell.
Ask Caiaphas: for he can tell.”
Here follow as given by Caiaphas the old charges of Sabbath-breach, blasphemy and strange doctrine; given again almost word for word, but with a nobler frame of context, in the Marriage of Heaven and Hell, where, and not here, we will prefer to read them. One charge will be allowed to pass as new coin, having Blake’s image and superscription in lieu of Cæsar’s.
“He turned the devils into swine
That he might tempt the Jews to dine;
Since when, a pig has got a look
That for a Jew may be mistook.
‘Obey your parents’? What says he?
‘Woman, what have I to do with thee?
No earthly parents I confess:
I am doing my Father’s business.’
He scorned earth’s parents, scorned earth’s God,
And mocked the one and the other’s rod;
His seventy disciples sent[43]
Against religion and government,”
and caused his followers to die by the sword of justice as rebels and blasphemers of this world’s God and his law: overturned “the tent of secret sins and its God,” with all the cords of his weaving, prisons of his building and snares of his setting; overthrew the “bloody shrine of war,” the holy place of the God of battles, whose cruel light and fire of wrath was poured forth upon the world till it reached “from star to star”; thus casting down all things of “church and state as by law established,” camps and shrines, temples and prisons,
“Halls of justice, hating vice,
Where the devil combs his lice.”