It is against this spiritual deadness that he brings his protest, which is to awaken Albion out of the sleep of death, 'his long and cold repose.' 'Therefore Los,' the spirit of prophecy, and thus Blake, who 'kept the Divine Vision in time of trouble,' stands in London building Golgonooza, 'the spiritual fourfold London,' the divine City of God. Of the real or earthly London he says in Jerusalem:
'I see London blind and age bent begging thro' the
Streets
Of Babylon, led by a child, his tears run down his
beard!'
Babylon, in Blake, means 'Rational Morality.' In the Songs of Innocence we shall see the picture, at the head of the poem called 'London.' In that poem Blake numbers the cries which go up in 'London's chartered streets,' the cry of the chimney-sweeper, of the soldier, of the harlot; and he says:
'In every cry of every man,
In every infant's cry of fear,
In every voice, in every ban,
The mind-forged manacles I hear.'
Into these lines he condenses much of his gospel. What Blake most hated on earth were 'mind-forged manacles.' Reason seemed to him to have laid its freezing and fettering hand on every warm joy, on every natural freedom, of body and soul; all his wrath went out against the forgers and the binders of these fetters. In his earlier poems he sings the instinctive joys of innocence; in his later, the wise joys of experience; and all the Prophetic Books are so many songs of mental liberty and invectives against every form of mental oppression. 'And Jerusalem is called Liberty among the Children of Albion.' One of the Prophetic Books, Ahania, can be condensed into a single sentence, one of its lines: 'Truth has bounds; Error has none.' Yet this must be understood to mean that error is the 'indefinite void 'and truth a thing minutely organized; not that truth can endure bondage or limitation from without. He typifies Moral Law by Rahab, the harlot of the Bible, a being of hidden, hypocritic cruelty. Chastity is no more in itself than a lure of the harlot, typifying unwilling restraint, a negation, and no personal form of energy.
'No individual can keep the Laws, for they are death
To every energy of man, and forbid the springs
of life.'
It is energy that is virtue, and, above all, mental energy. 'The treasures of heaven are not negations of passion, but realities of intellect, from which all the passions emanate, uncurbed in their eternal glory.' 'It was the tree of the knowledge of good and evil that brought sin into the world by creating distinctions, by calling this good and that evil.' Blake says in Jerusalem:
'And in this manner of the Sons of Albion in their
strength;
They take the Two Contraries which are called Qualities,
with which
Every Substance is clothed, they name them Good and
Evil,
From them they make an Abstract, which is a Negation
Not only of the Substance from which it is derived,
A murderer of its own Body: but also a murderer
Of every Divine Member: it is the Reasoning Power,
An Abstract objecting power, that Negatives
everything.
This is the Spectre of Man: the Holy Reasoning
Power,
And in its Holiness is closed the Abomination of
Desolation.'
The active form of sin is judgment, intellectual cruelty, unforgivingness, punishment. 'In Hell is all self-righteousness; there is no such thing as forgiveness of sins.' In his picture of the 'Last Judgment' he represents the Furies by men, not women; and for this reason: 'The spectator may suppose them clergymen in the pulpit, scourging sin instead of forgiving it.' In Jerusalem he says:
'And the appearance of a Man was seen in the
Furnaces,
Saving those who have sinned from the punishment
of the Law
(In pity of the punisher whose state is eternal
death),
And keeping them from Sin by the mild counsels of
his love.'