Page:William Blake, a critical essay (Swinburne).djvu/298

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264
WILLIAM BLAKE.

noble conception, developing easily and rapidly into what was once called the Manichean doctrine as to the Old Testament.

"If the guilty should be condemned, he must be an Eternal Death,
And one must die for another throughout all Eternity;
Satan is fallen from his station and can never be redeemed,
But must be new-created continually moment by moment,
And therefore the class of Satan shall be called the Elect, and those
Of Rintrah the Reprobate, and those of Palamabron the Redeemed;
For he is redeemed from Satan's law, the wrath falling on Rintrah.
And therefore Palamabron cared not to call a solemn Assembly
Till Satan had assumed Rintrah's wrath in the day of mourning,
In a feminine delusion[1] of false pride self-deceived."

The words of the text recur not unfrequently in the prophetic books. A single final act of redemption by sacrifice and oblation of one for another is not admitted as sufficient, or even possible. The favourite dogma is this, of the eternity of sacrifice; endless redemption to be bought at no less a price than endless self-devotion. To this plea of "an Eternal" before the assembly succeeds the myth of Leutha "offering herself a ransom for

  1. Compare, for the doctrine as to delusion and jealousy being feminine principles (destructive by their weakness, not by their strength), this strange expostulation with God, recalling the tone of earlier prophets:

    Why art thou silent and invisible,
    Father of Jealousy?
    Why dost thou hide thyself in clouds
    From every searching eye?

    Why darkness and obscurity
    In all thy words and laws,
    That none dare eat the fruit but from
    The wily serpent's jaws?
    Or is it because Jealousy[†]
    Gives feminine applause?"

      † (This word, half rubbed off in the MS., may be "secrecy"; and the point would remain the same.)