this long passage because, though the very keystone of his thought, it is
little known, being sunk, like nearly all of his most profound thoughts,
in the mysterious prophetic books. Obscure about much else, they are
always lucid on this one point, and return to it again and again. 'I care
not whether a man is good or bad,' are the words they put into the mouth
of God, 'all I care is whether he is a wise man or a fool. Go put off
holiness and put on intellect.' This cultivated life, which seems to us so
artificial a thing, is really, according to them, the laborious
re-discovery of the golden age, of the primeval simplicity, of the simple
world in which Christ taught and lived, and its lawlessness is the
lawlessness of Him 'who being all virtue, acted from impulse and not from
rules,'

And his seventy disciples sent
Against religion and government.

The historical Christ was indeed no more than the supreme symbol of the
artistic imagination, in which, with every passion wrought to perfect
beauty by art and poetry, we shall live, when the body has passed away for
the last time; but before that hour man must labour through many lives and
many deaths. 'Men are admitted into heaven not because they have curbed
and governed their passions, but because they have cultivated their
understandings. The treasures of heaven are not negations of passion but
realities of intellect from which the passions emanate uncurbed in their
eternal glory. The fool shall not enter into heaven, let him be ever so
holy. Holiness is not the price of entering into heaven. Those who are
cast out are all those who, having no passions of their own, because no
intellect, have spent their lives in curbing and governing other people's
lives by the various arts of poverty and cruelty of all kinds. The modern
Church crucifies Christ with the head downwards. Woe, woe, woe to you
hypocrites.' After a time man has 'to return to the dark valley whence he
came and begin his labours anew,' but before that return he dwells in the
freedom of imagination, in the peace of the 'divine image,' 'the divine
vision,' in the peace that passes understanding and is the peace of art.
'I have been very near the gates of death,' Blake wrote in his last
letter, 'and have returned very weak and an old man, feeble and tottering
but not in spirit and life, not in the real man, the imagination which
liveth for ever. In that I grow stronger and stronger as this foolish body
decay