True Religion vs. Ritual and Creeds

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Blake On Religion

Blake saw the whole vision so perfectly, so clearly, and told us in his fabulous works. Said he of the Bible: “I know of no other Christianity and no other Gospel than the liberty both of mind and body to exercise the Divine Arts of Imagination. Imagination the real and eternal world into which we shall all go after the death of this vegetable mortal body.” He would accept no other form of Christianity. And he said: “All ritual, all creeds,” everything in the form of a ritual “was anti-Christ.” No religion means by definition a time, devotion to the most exalted reality that one has experienced. But religion as practiced is simply artifice, creed, ceremony, confession, and all outward show, and Blake would have none of it. The whole thing to him was anti-Christian, because to him the whole thing was from within, something the individual experienced that no one by argument could shake. Years later, another brilliant mind, William James, made this observation and wrote it in a letter (not in a book) to his son. The son allowed it to be published in 1920 in The Atlantic Monthly. In this letter, James said: “The mother seed, the fountain-head of religion, begins in the mystical experience of the individual. All theology, all ecclestiastism, are secondary growth, superimposed. These experiences belong to a region that is deeper, wiser and more practical than that which the intellect inhabits. For this they are indestructible by intellectual arguments and criticism.” Blake would have endorsed that one hundred per cent.

Neville, through Blake and William James, defines true religion as the individual's mystical experience and the exercise of the Divine Arts of Imagination, which is the real and eternal world. He asserts that all external rituals, creeds, ceremonies, and outward shows are 'anti-Christ' and secondary growths that obscure the inner, experiential truth of Christianity.

Read Blake On Religion on MyNevilleGoddard.com