One other high church divine, William Law, Blake should have read, but strangely makes no mention of. Law’s Serious Call to a Devout and Holy Life and his Christian Perfection were more likely to appeal to Johnson than to Blake, but the later books, The Spirit of Prayer and The Spirit of Love, written after he had come under the influence of Boehme, while estranging him from Johnson and Wesley, might have brought him and Blake face to face. Both books are more beautiful than anything written by Wesley, Whitefield, or Swedenborg. Perhaps, as Blake already had read something of Boehme, he found that Law had nothing to add to his knowledge.

There is ample evidence that Blake turned his full attention on to Wesley, Whitefield, and Hervey, and watched them with sympathy. These men were proclaiming everywhere the need of being born again. No one met Blake so definitely on what he had always seen clearly, with large, childlike vision. When Samuel Foote, representative of a thousand others, carelessly threw the epithet “hypocrite” at Whitefield’s head, Blake was indignant, and accurately designated the actor as the hypocrite. With perfect justice he pointed out that if Whitefield confessed his sins before all the world, and never pretended to be free from the passions that burn in other men, he was certainly an honest and sincere man. To pounce on a Christian who inadvertently falls, and call him a hypocrite, is as usual now as in Blake’s day, but it comes with astonishing gracelessness from the lips of those who have spent their youthful passions in wanton waste, and, wearied and bored, are bidding for a respectable middle age.

Whitefield had pungent things to say to respectable moralists. He had no milder term than “filthy rags” for their dull moralities. If he sought to cover his nakedness with the garment of Christ’s righteousness, Blake, while using a different phrase, perfectly understood him and sympathized. But then came the divergence. Whitefield’s doctrine of the new birth was inextricably bound up with crude doctrines of Christ’s substitutionary death and imputed righteousness, and Blake, who had experienced the new birth quite apart from faith in these particular Calvinist dogmas, felt no need to cling to what his instinctive feeling rejected; and, what with him was final, he found that Whitefield not only left his æsthetic faculties starved, but actually believed that as the arts came from Tubal and Tubal-cain, and they were descended from Cain, who had been cursed, they must necessarily have their origin from hell.

Hervey carried Blake as far as Whitefield, and no farther. Some years later, when Blake had diverged widely from Whitefield and Hervey, he still remembered them with tenderness and affection; and placing them with Fénelon, Madame Guyon, St Theresa (an odd assortment!), saw them at Los’ South Gate, “with all the gentle souls who guide the great Wine-press of Love.”[2]

Blake found that he could keep company with Wesley for a longer time. Wesley had no rigid Calvinism, and he was not content unless imputed righteousness should pass by a second blessing into imparted holiness. Here also Blake’s language was wholly different from Wesley’s, but the thing he arrived at—the unification of all his powers under the inspiration and creative force of his imagination—led him along a path very like that trodden by Wesley and his methodists as they pressed towards the goal of entire sanctification. It is important to go behind words to things, but it is equally important to come back to a form of sound words. The methodists have been imprisoned by their wordy formulæ, while Blake by his vision of the things behind words not only preserved his freedom, but also, by freeing his imagination, was enabled to create beautiful rhythmic words which invoke instead of imprison.

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JOHN GASPAR LAVATER.
Engraved by Blake.

Among his contemporaries Blake discovered a deeper kinship with Lavater than with any of these. Whitefield and Wesley had succeeded in reviving in themselves the first glow and enthusiasm of protestantism. Lavater is once removed from his zealous protestant forefathers, and the things that they had repressed were making their reappearance in him. Among these was the feeling for the beautiful, which, as he welcomed and nourished it, deepened his sympathies and enlarged his outlook. What he lost in fiery zeal he gained in geniality. He had a constant perception of the truth that outward things are an index to inner conditions and correspond with them. This prompted him to observe the faces of his fellow-creatures and to attempt a system of physiognomy. His instinctive reading of faces was often astonishingly correct; but his makeshift system has no value. More to the point are his aphorisms, which were read and annotated by Blake, and these are sufficient both to reveal Lavater and bring certain lasting convictions of Blake’s into a clear light. I will take a few of the more important.

Sin and destruction of order are the same.