Page:William Blake, a critical essay (Swinburne).djvu/295

 Rh Let the Súfis of the West make what construction they can of that doctrine. We will help them, before passing on, with another view of the Atonement, taken from The Everlasting Gospel.

That is, the spirit must be eternally at work consuming and destroying the likeness of things material and the religions made out of them. This over-fervent prophet of freedom for the senses as well as the soul would have them free, one may say, only for the soul's sake: talking as we see he did of redemption from the body and salvation by the spirit at war with it, in words which literally taken would hardly have misbecome a monk of Nitria.

Returning to the Milton, we are caught again in the mythologic whirlpools and cross-currents of symbol and doctrine; our ears rung deaf and dazed by the hammers of Los (Time) and our eyes bewildered by the wheels and woofs of Enitharmon (Space): "her looms vibrate with soft affections, weaving the Web of Life out from the ashes of the Dead." This is a fragment of the main myth, whose details Los and Enitharmon themselves for the present forbid our following out.