. . . if we have doubts about the value of Blake’s method, we have only to compare the poetic value of his reading of the Bible with that of the corporeal understanding. To the imaginative eye, the Bible begins in a world of chaos without form and void, continues through primitive legend and history to the prophets, proceeds from their far-off visions of a Redeemer and a New Jerusalem to Jesus, and from Jesus to the final blinding flash of revelation, the vision of the completed City of God and the disappearance of nature. To the corporeal understanding, the Bible begins in historical reminiscence and barbarous cosmology which, if often repulsive, is at any rate intelligible, proceeds to some irascible sermons on morality, the social insight of which is concealed in a good deal of fustian about a Messiah and a Last Day, goes on to the life and tragic death of a saintly teacher whose refined ethics were distorted into a grotesque myth by unintelligent disciples, and finally ends in the most impenetrably turgid allegory ever devised in language—if one can call its illiterate mixture of Greek words and Hebrew syntax and language. To the corporeal understanding, in short, the Bible’s final “Revelation” is an utter mystery: that is, it bears the same name as the Great Whore whose destruction it foretells. A precisely similar paradox lurks in the mysterious symbolism of Blake.