For many years Christianity and repression were for him synonymous terms. His craving was for expression. Parents, teachers, priests, kings, governments, were enemies to spontaneous self-expression. Then they must go. His youthful exuberance admitted of no half-measures. Like Ezekiel and Christ, he poured out his invective against hireling shepherds: unlike them, he ceased for a time to believe in good shepherds. One and all they were out to repress men's instincts and passions, until, driven in, the pent-up passion poisoned their whole nature, or in the weaker sort was rendered passive. Blake proclaimed his doctrine with vehemence, but no one regarded him.
Pursuing this course for many years, he perceived some wonderful things. Art is expression; and he made an application of all the glories of art to human character. Teach men to express themselves, and then instead of their being as dull and similar as a flock of sheep governed by the herd instinct, they would grow into a beautiful variety. Man would create himself as an artist creates his works. The same law governed both. Repression when successful induced a nerveless, sapless type. Man became an overwhipped dog. Expression produced a strong, beautiful character above all petty and tiresome rules of conduct. The conduct of such is carelessly right.
It was by Blake's frank proclamation of the _ego_ that he anticipated so much of what the modern apostles of the superman have made us all familiar with. From Ibsen's _Doll's House_ to Nietzsche's _Thus spake Zarathustra_, confidence in the _ego_ has been proclaimed as the means to liberty, beauty, and sovereignty; and this has been accompanied by revivals on a large scale of those ancient mystery religions that turn on the culture of the divine _ego_.
This was a road of excess which Blake pursued as far as an individual might. In the nineteenth century the law of the _ego_, the struggle for life, the survival of the fittest, brute force, were regarded as all one, and transferred from the individual to the State, till in a few years the world was plunged into war.
Blake's voyage of rediscovery began during the Reign of Terror. The new teachers, like Swedenborg and Godwin, Tom Paine and Mary Wollstonecraft, failed to satisfy his own craving for expression. The Reign of Terror appalled him when it showed him his principle at work in the proletariat. Then it was that turning again to the Evangelists he made the wonderful discovery, which later apostles of the _ego_ have not made, that Jesus Christ was the perfect example and embodiment of his vision. He had pictured to himself a man, impelled by a creative passion, whose character in every part should be manifestly the outcome of fiery energy. And there was the Man in the Subject of the Gospels. But he saw that Jesus Christ could not be labelled or classed. There was egoistic self-expression in Him, and there was self-renunciation. Somehow He had altogether escaped the modern dilemma of self-expression or self-sacrifice. Both were magnificently present in Him and united, because His self-expression was resting on His self-surrender to God. Give up God, and man swings perpetually between duty to neighbour and duty to self. Believe in and surrender to God, and each falls into its proper place. This was not the only synthesis in the character of Jesus. He was a union of all possible contraries. Gentleness and fierceness; non-resistance and aggressive force; non-resentment and fiery invective; forgiveness and severe justice, haughty pride and lowliness; self-confidence and utter dependence upon God, all were in Jesus. Henceforth Blake could keep his vision of Jesus and his vision of art, for they were one.