way. Can we justify the peculiar
characteristics of Hoxton: congratulate ourselves on the amount of
light, air and beauty which its inhabitants enjoy, the sort of children
that are reared in it, as the best we can do towards furthering the
racial aim? It is a monument of stupidity no less than of meanness. Yet
the conception of God which the whole religious experience of growing
man presses on us, suggests that both intelligence and love ought to
characterize His ideal for human life. Look then at these, and all the
other things of the same kind. Look at our attitude towards
prostitution, at the drink traffic, at the ugliness and injustice of the
many institutions which we allow to endure. Look at them in the
Universal Spirit; and then consider, whether a searching corporate
repentance is not really the inevitable preliminary of a social and
spiritual advance. All these things have happened because we have as a
body consistently fallen below our best possible, lacked courage to
incarnate our vision in the political sphere. Instead, we have, acted on
the crowd level, swayed by unsublimated instincts of acquisition,
disguised lust, self-preservation, self-assertion, and ignoble fear: and
such a fall-back is the very essence of social sin.

We have made many plans and elevations; but we have not really tried to
build Jerusalem either in our own hearts or in "England's pleasant
land." Blake thought that the preliminary of such a building up of the
harmonious social order must be the building up or harmonizing of men,
of each man; and when this essential work was really done, Heaven's
"Countenance Divine" would suddenly declare itself "among the dark
Satanic mills."[152] What was wrong with man, and ultimately therefore
with society, was the cleavage between his "Spectre" or energetic
intelligence, and "Emanation" or loving imagination. Divided, they only
tormented one another. United, they were the material of divine
humanity. Now the complementary affirmative movement which shall balance
and complete true social penitence will be just such a unification and
dedication of society's best energies and noblest ideals, now commonly
separated. The Spectre is attending to economics: the Emanation is
dreaming of Utopia. We want to see them united, for from this union
alone will come the social aspect for surrender. That is to say, a
single-minded, unselfish yielding to those good social impulses which we
all feel from time to time