Page:William Blake, a critical essay (Swinburne).djvu/276

 244 nor as yet can the trumpet of revolution summon the dead to judgment. That first blast of summons must be blown by material science, which destroys the letter of the law and the text of the covenant. When the "mighty spirit" of Newton had seized the trumpet and blown it,

as to this day they do, and did in Blake's time, throughout whole barrowfuls of controversial "apologies" and "evidences." Then the mother-goddess awoke from her eighteen centuries of sleep, the "Christian era" being now wellnigh consummated, and all those years "fled as if they had not been;" she called her children around her, by many monstrous names and phrases of chaotic invocation; comfort and happiness here, there sweet pestilence and soft delusion; the "seven churches of Leutha" seek the love of "Antamon," symbolic of Christian faith reconciled to "pagan" indulgence and divorced from Jewish prohibition; even as we find in the prophet himself equal faith in sensual innocence and spiritual truth. Of "the soft Oothoon" the great goddess asks now "Why wilt thou give up woman's secrecy, my melancholy child? Between two moments bliss is ripe." Last she calls upon Orc; "Smile, son of my afflictions; arise and give our mountains joy of thy red light."