have attacked the problem directly, and carrying mystical thought to its logical conclusion, have unhesitatingly asserted that God is the origin of Good and Evil alike, that God and the devil, in short, are but two sides of the same Force.  We have seen how this is worked out by Boehme, and that the central point of his philosophy is that all manifestation necessitates opposition.  In like manner, Blake’s statement, “Without Contraries is no progression,” is, in truth, the keynote to all his vision and mythology.

     Attraction and Repulsion, Benson and Energy, Love and Hate, are
     necessary to Human existence.

     From these contraries spring what the religious call Good and Evil.

     Good is the passive that obeys Reason.  Evil is the active springing
     from Energy.  Good is Heaven.  Evil is Hell.

With these startling remarks Blake opens what is the most intelligible and concise of all the prophetic books, The Marriage of Heaven and Hell.  Swinburne calls it the greatest of Blake’s books, and ranks it as about the greatest work “produced by the eighteenth century in the line of high poetry and spiritual speculation.”  We may think Swinburne’s praise excessive, but at any rate it is well worth reading (Essay on Blake, 1906 edn., pp. 226-252).  Certainly, if one work had to be selected as representative of Blake, as containing his most characteristic doctrines clothed in striking form, this is the book to be chosen.  Place a copy of The Marriage of Heaven and Hell in the hands of any would-be Blake student (an original or facsimile copy, needless to say, containing Blake’s exquisite designs, else the book is shorn of half its force and beauty); let him ponder it closely, and he will either be repelled and shocked, in which case he had better read no more Blake, or he will be strangely stirred and thrilled, he will be touched with a spark of the fire from Blake’s spirit which quickens its words as the leaping tongues of flame illuminate its pages.  The kernel of the book, and indeed of all Blake’s message, is contained in the following statements on p. 4, headed “The Voice of the Devil.”

     All Bibles or sacred codes have been the causes of the following
     Errors:—­

     1.  That man has two real existing principles, viz. a Body and a
     Soul.

     2.  That Energy, called Evil, is alone from the Body; and that
     reason, called Good, is alone from the Soul.

     3.  That God will torment Man in Eternity for following his
     Energies.

     But the following Contraries to these are True:—­

     1.  Man has no Body distinct from his Soul, for that called Body is
     a portion of Soul discerned by the five Senses, the chief inlets of
     Soul in this age.

     2.  Energy is the only life and is from the Body, and Reason is the
     bound or outward circumference of Energy.