THE SUPREME VISION
Blake did well to be angry--so he believed. The years were slipping by,
and the gleams of light that had promised a glad day now seldom came.
Hayley had passed out of his life. Cromek could make the money out of him
that he could not make for himself. Stothard, he believed, had acted with
his eyes open. As he brooded on these things, anger and resentment took
possession of him. His courage was failing. His resentments secreted
poison that was surely spreading through his entire being and threatening
to turn the once overtrustful Blake into a disillusioned and bitter old
man.
Then he turned to the gospel, not like tens of thousands to find comfort,
but to justify himself in his attitude of defiance, and to assure himself
that his anger was godlike. He fixed his eyes on to the figure of Jesus,
and essayed the difficult task of seeing Him as He was.
There was not much help coming even from those contemporaries whom he
admired.
Wesley and Whitefield proclaimed incessantly the death of Jesus as the one
availing sacrifice for sin, but they appeared to contemplate the life of
Jesus as little as the great Apostle of the Gentiles. William Law, in a
sweat of excitement at his finding of Boehme, devoted all his powers to
discovering the riches of the mystical indwelling Christ.
Since Blake's day the higher critics have given their whole lives to
carving out a human Jesus from the mass of myth, legend, and tradition.
After this wholesale rejection of the supernatural, it strikes one as
comic to hear Samuel Butler solemnly assuring us that there are many gaps
in the character of Jesus that we may fill up, as we like, from our own
ideals. The old dilemma was, Either Jesus was divine or He was not good:
to-day it is, Either Jesus was falsely reported or He was mad.
To the old orthodoxy Jesus was all gentleness, meekness, and mildness. To
the new heterodoxy He was afraid of reality and life, and in His manners
vehement, impatient, and rude. Some see in Him the pattern of obedience:
others the flaunter of all authority.
Blake, as we saw, had reckoned himself among the rebels. He pitted the
future against the past. This was in his youth. Since then he had been
learning that the past held endless treasures, and now he was forced to
consider that it held Jesus. Rebellion must go beyond Jesus. Blake tried,
but he could not pass Him. He gazed at Him until he was seized by Him.
Passionately he contemplated Him. He perceived the energy and force of His
anger and wrath, which like lightning struck the strongholds of evil and
levelled them. He saw Him, His furious ire bursting forth until it became
a chariot of fire. Then driving His course throughout the land, cursing
the scribe and Pharisee, trampling down hypocrisy, breaking the Gates of
Death till they let in day, with bright scourge in hand scourging the
merchant Canaanite until:
"With wrath He did subdue
The serpent bulk of Nature's dross
Till He had nailed it to the Cross."
[Illustration: THE PRAYER OF THE INFANT JESUS.
_Reproduced by kind permission of Mr Sydney Morse._]
Here was what Blake wanted--an anger and fury only greater than his own.
He proceeded impatiently to tear to pieces the conventional Jesus.
Was Jesus obedient, or gentle, or humble? There is no simple answer. His
life was dual--Godward and manward. To God He was obedient and humble: to
man disobedient and proud. His life cannot be explained in terms of law,
just because it was a life, and life is greater than law or logic. It was
no more possible for Him to keep the letter of the ten commandments than
for us. He set aside the Sabbath, He exposed His disciples to murder, He
turned the law from harlots, He lived a vagrant life on other people's
hard-won gains; He coveted the best gifts for His friends; He lived, not
by laws and rules, but by an all-compelling instinct and impulse. He
became in the eyes of His contemporaries a criminal only deserving of
capital punishment.
Blake read on breathlessly.
A woman, a sinner taken in the act, was brought to this terrible Jesus.
Instantly He became a lamb. With exquisite gentleness, sweetness, and
tact, He spoke words chosen not to wound or shame her, and then sent her
away forgiven and blest. This was no isolated event. His kindness to
outcasts never failed. He was angry with Pharisees, yet even to them
strangely without resentment. There was in Him a marvellously tender
compassion, united with a hot hatred of meanness and hypocrisy. All fierce
extremes met in Him. Here was what Blake had been seeking all his
life--that for which he had been a rebel. Just here, in the old gospel,
looming out of the past, he gained his supreme vision of One who satisfied
his utmost need. He gazed, and worshipped Him in His immense energy and
strength, His lowliness and meekness, Who had deserved all that His
chosen people could give Him, yet had borne no resentment when they
despised and rejected Him. Slowly Blake saw his life as a mere blot by the
side of that resplendent life. Then all resentment died in him. The child
spirit returned. He accepted his earthly lot, henceforth content to do his
work with all his might, careless whether his generation paid the wages
due to him or not.