Man's most valuable gift of God is passion. What a man makes of his life will depend on how he regards his passion, and into what channels he directs its course.
Thus Blake unites contraries. But just as all is going merry as a marriage bell, he suddenly declares that there are some contraries that can never be married. The modern immanentist world is trying to unite good and evil, beauty and ugliness, with baneful results. We are told that there is nothing ugly to the discerning eye, and one wonders why one should take pains to improve ones crude daubs. Blake says that religious people are always trying to make these false matches. He gives as a typical example the prolific and devourer--the active and passive. Each is necessary to the other's existence. Union destroys both. It is easy to multiply examples. Black and white produce grey, beautiful in art, but depressing in life. Dark and light, twilight, beautiful, but sad and lowering. Cold and heat, lukewarmness, which is hateful. Hard and soft, slush, which abounds in modern thought. Hate and love, unctuousness or slime, which is particularly obnoxious in some religious people.
Blake hated these mashes. He had no faith in the love that could not hate. Just as he seemed on the brink of sweeping away hell like an amiable modern, he discovered that though he had made quick work of the Swedenborgian and protestant hell, yet hell as Christ thought of it remained and must remain. "Note.--Jesus Christ did not wish to unite, but to separate them, as in the Parable of sheep and goats. And He says, 'I come not to send Peace, but a Sword.'" Thus Blake kept his perception clear and sharp. In following his own mental energy he was able to shake off all pantheistic distortions of good and evil, and to see that though with the majority these are mere abstractions, yet there is ultimately an eternal distinction between them, and therefore heaven and earth may pass away, but Jesus Christ's word concerning heaven and hell will abide for ever.
Christians have thought of heaven and hell too much as of future places. Blake thought of them primarily as present states. Here a man's state is obscured by its intermingling with conditions of space and time. Hereafter the state creates the environment. The man in a state of hell, and therefore in hell, is the one whose energy or vital fire is dead. The man in a state of Heaven is the one who lives the more abundant life in which his religion, art, and philosophy have become one. The real hell and the real heaven can never be married, for any attempt to marry them results in moral loss. But a man can pass from a state of hell into a state of heaven, and the way to do it is the old way of repentance and faith--repentance which changes heart and mind by giving them a new object, and faith that takes and receives the glad tidings of the Kingdom of God.