And in his greatest paradox and deepest passion of truth, he affirms:
'I care not whether a Man is Good or Evil; all that I
care
Is whether he is a Wise Man or a Fool. Go, put off
Holiness
And put on Intellect.'
That holiness may be added to wisdom Blake asks only that continual forgiveness of sins which to him meant understanding, and thus intellectual sympathy; and he sees in the death of Jesus the supreme symbol of this highest mental state.
'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 little
Death
In the Divine Image, nor can Man exist but by
Brotherhood.'
Of Blake it may be said as he says of Albion: 'He felt that Love and Pity are the same,' and to Love and Pity he gave the ultimate jurisdiction over humanity.
Blake's gospel of forgiveness rests on a very elaborate structure, which he has built up in his doctrine of 'States.' At the head of the address to the Deists in the third chapter of Jerusalem, he has written: 'The Spiritual States of the Soul are all Eternal. Distinguish between the Man and his present State.' Much of his subtlest casuistry is expended on this distinction, and, as he makes it, it is profoundly suggestive. Erin says, in Jerusalem:
'Learn therefore, O Sisters, to distinguish the Eternal
Human
That walks about among the stones of fire, in bliss
and woe
Alternate, from those States or Worlds in which the
Spirit travels:
This is the only means to Forgiveness of Enemies.'
The same image is used again:
'As the Pilgrim passes while the Country permanent
remains,
So Men pass on; but States remain permanent for
ever;'
And, again, in almost the same words, in the prose fragment on the picture of the 'Last Judgment': 'Man passes on, but states remain for ever; he passes through them like a traveller, who may as well suppose that the places he has passed through exist no more, as a man may suppose that the states he has passed through exist no more: everything is eternal.' By states Blake means very much what we mean by moods, which, in common with many mystics, he conceives as permanent spiritual forces, through which what is transitory in man passes, while man imagines that they, more transitory than himself, are passing through him. It is from this conception of man as a traveller, and of good and evil, the passions and virtues and sensations and ideas of man, as spiritual countries, eternally remaining, through which he passes, that Blake draws his inference: condemn, if you will, the state which you call sin, but do not condemn the individual whose passage through it may he a necessity of his journey. And his litany is: