No More Learning

What is mortality
but the things relating to the body which dies? What is immortality
but the things relating to the spirit which lives immortally? What is
the joy of Heaven but improvement in the things of the spirit? What
are the pains of Hell but ignorance, idleness, bodily lust, and the
devastation of the things of the spirit? Answer this for yourselves,
and expel from amongst you those who pretend to despise the labours
of art and science, which alone are the labours of the gospel. Is not
this plain and manifest to the thought? Can you think at all, and not
pronounce heartily that to labour in knowledge is to build Jerusalem,
and to despise knowledge is to despise Jerusalem and her builders? And
remember, he who despises and mocks a mental gift in another, calling
it pride, and selfishness, and sin, mocks Jesus, the giver of every
mental gift, which always appear to the ignorance-loving hypocrites
as sins. But that which is sin in the sight of cruel man is not sin
in the sight of our kind God. Let every Christian as much as in him
lies engage himself openly and publicly before all the world in some
mental pursuit for the building of Jerusalem. ' I have given the whole
of 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 decays. . . . Flaxman is gone, and we must
all soon follow, every one to his eternal home, leaving the delusions
of goddess Nature and her laws, to get into freedom from all the laws
of the numbers,' the multiplicity of nature, 'into the mind in which
every one is king and priest in his own house. ' The phrase about the
king and priest is a memory of the crown and mitre set upon Dante's
head before he entered Paradise.