_He who adores an impersonal God has none, and without guide or rudder launches on an immense abyss that first absorbs his powers and next himself._
Blake: "Most superlatively beautiful, and most affectionately holy and pure. Would to God that all men would consider it."
His faith in a personal God was his lifelong inspiration in religion and art. This must guard him against the charge of pantheism made against him by the Swedenborgian Garth Wilkinson and our fleshly poet Swinburne. Yet he never thought out his position clear of pantheism. Swedenborg worshipped a personal God and regarded man and nature as emanations from God removed by varying degrees. But no matter how many degrees, continuous or discrete, one removes ultimates from God, yet if they are essentially emanations from Him, they must be of the same substance, and this is pantheism. Catholic theology has grappled far more effectually with this ancient difficulty than either Swedenborg or Blake.
Blake: "I once thought otherwise, but now I know it is truth." Let those who confound mysticism with abstraction note this.
Blake perceived in Lavater the innocence of a child, and loved him accordingly; but he had already surpassed him, and thus was able to criticize him with true discernment. He said that Lavater made "everything originate in its accident." But a man's sins are accidents and not a part of his real nature. They are a denial of his real man, and therefore are negative. Hence he says: "Vice is a great negation. Every man's leading propensity ought to be called his leading Virtue and his good Angel." This last sentence contains Nietzsche. Every positive act is virtue. Murder, theft, backbiting, undermining, circumventing, are vicious because they are not positive acts, but prevent them in the perpetrator and the victim. He put his finger on Lavater's other mistake, which was also shared by his contemporaries. "They suppose that Woman's Love is Sin. In consequence, all the loves and graces, with them, are sins." Blake not only here outstrips his contemporaries, but at a leap reaches what are the conclusions of the twentieth century. In the nineteenth, men and women racked their brains over the irreconcilable dualism of art and religion, and they chose one or the other, with baneful results. Blake reconciled the two when he saw that the new man in us, unveiled by regeneration, worked by direct vision (religion), and that the new man's prime quality was imagination (art). Once he grasped this, the problem ceased for him.