Page:Biographical and critical studies by James Thomson ("B.V.").djvu/363

 A STRANGE BOOK 347 faces resembled a round broad cake, and their arms rotate like a wheel. Except Rabelais and Dean Swift, nobody ever had such science of filth and corruption." Is this summary by an outsider too hideous ? Take some shreds of Wilkinson's exposition of his master's doctrine : — " Infidelity denies God most in spirit and the spiritual world ; nay, staked on death it ignores eternity in the eternal state with gnashing teeth and hideous clenches ; and the proof of spirit and immortal life is farther off than ever. The rSgime of the work- house, the hospital, and the madhouse is erected into a remorse- less universe, self-fitted with steel fingers and awful chirurgery ; and no hope lies either in sorrow or poverty, but only in one divine religion, which hell excludes with all its might. Human nature quails before such tremendous moralities. ... A new phase appears in the final state ; the memory of the skies is lost ; baseness accepts its lot, and falsehood becomes self-evident ; wasting ensues to compressed limb and faculty, and the evil spirit descends to his mineral estate, a living atom of the second death. He is still associated with his like in male and female company, and he and his, in the charry light of hell, which is the very falsity of evil, are not unhandsome to themselves. Such is the illusive varnish which in mercy [! I] drapes the bareness of the ugly skeletons of devils and Satans." — " Biography," 147 ; see also pp. 113 and 115, 1 16 for more about hell, and a defensive exposition (marvellously lame for such a swift genius as Wilkin- son) of Swedenborg's doctrine of eternal punishment. And to balance this truly diabolical hell, a mere spider-web heaven, frigid, colourless, joyless, loveless, lifeless, abstract, a paradise of geometrical diagrams and algebraic formulae ! Blake has his fiery denunciations and condemna- tions, but with him these are merely explosions of temper; they are as different from the systematic, coldblooded mercilessness of Swedenborg as the expletive "Hell and damnation!" of a burly coal-