We may now as well look into a later division of the poem, where Christ is tempted of Satan to obey.
'John for disobedience bled;
But you can turn the stones to bread.
God's high king and God's high priest
Shall plant their glories in your breast
If Caiaphas you will obey,
If Herod you with bloody prey
Feed with the sacrifice[1] and be
Obedient, fall down, worship me.'
Thunder and lightning broke around
And Jesus' voice in thunder's sound;
'Thus I seize the spiritual prey;
Ye smiters with disease, make way.
I come your King and God to seize;
Is God a smiter with disease?'"
This divine revolt and deliverance of the spiritual human "prey" out of the hands of law and fangs of religion is made matter of accusation against him by the "unredeemable part of the world" of which we spoke—using here as its mouthpiece the "shadowy man" or phantasmal shell of man, which "rolled away" when the times were full "from the limbs of Jesus, to make them his prey":—
Crying 'Crucify this cause of distress
Who don't keep the secrets of holiness.
All mental powers by diseases we bind:
But he heals the deaf and the dumb and the blind,
Whom God has afflicted for secret ends;
He comforts and heals and calls them friends.'"
But Christ, instead of becoming a prey to it, himself makes his prey of this unclean shadow or ghastly ghost
- ↑ An ugly specimen of ready-writing; meaning of course "with the sacrifice of bloody prey:" but doubtless even Blake would not have let this stand, though we cannot safely alter it: and the passage did upon the whole appear worth citing.
