Page:Life of William Blake, Gilchrist.djvu/447

 Rh had adopted, or thought out for himself, many of the ideas of the early Gnostics; and was otherwise so erratic in his religious opinions as to shock orthodox Churchmen. Once, in later years, a disputant got up and left his company. 'Ah,' said Blake, 'we could not get on at all: he wanted to teach me, and I to teach him.' A transcendental Christian rather than a literal one, he would often hazard wild assertions about Christ; yet would consider that a believer only in His historical character, in reality denied Him. 'Forgiveness of sins' was the corner-stone of Christianity to Blake's mind. He was for ever inscribing the tenet over his Gates of Paradise and elsewhere. The English Church, as he thought, too little inculcated it. He had a sentimental liking for the Romish Church, and, among other paradoxes, would often try to make out that priestly despotism was better than kingly. 'He believed no subjects of monarchies were so happy as the Pope's;' which sounds still more absurd now, than in times nearer those of the First Napoleon, when the poor Pope had, for a while, seemed the victim of military force, and an object of legitimate sympathy. Blake's friend may well add: 'I fancy this was one of his wilful sayings, and meant that he believed priests to be more favourable to liberty than kings: which he certainly did. He loved liberty, and had no affection for statecraft or standing armies, yet no man less resembled the vulgar radical. His sympathies were rather with Milton, Harrington, and Marvel—not with Milton as to his puritanism, but his love of a grand, ideal scheme of republicanism; though I never remember his speaking of the American institutions: I suppose Blake's republic would always have been ideal.' From the short poem entitled Thames and Ohio (see vol. ii.) it would, however, almost seem as if Blake had, at one moment, a passing project of emigrating to America. We must assuredly number among his more wilful assertions the curious hypothesis, ' that the Bonaparte of Italy was killed, and that another was somehow substituted