The Everlasting Gospel
Blake’s notebooks disclose an unfinished poem titled The Everlasting Gospel present in about a dozen pieces, and indications of at least one more that is missing. In other words, there is no "first edition" for this work. Several pieces are rewrites (sections 1 and 3), some are obvious inserts or unattached couplets. No arrangement is recognized as standard, and this version is no exception.
Yet the message of the poem is enduring, and presents a humanist document with few parallels and perhaps no predecessors. Blake’s personality was seen by his contemporaries as part genius, part naif—just the combination to touch areas of sensibility remote from the rest of us. But in fact good and evil are not at all remote, they are simply removed from our daily considerations. To live with such consciousness, and with such conviction to shout against the platitudes of our lives, may be possible only for such a personality.
The very short pieces entitled There Is No Natural Religion and All Religions Are One were both published in 1788, when Blake was thirty-one, and The Marriage of Heaven and Hell was written not long after. The fragments of The Everlasting Gospel are variously dated from 1808 to 1818, at which time Blake was in his fifties. The book was never published in Blake’s lifetime.
Sasha Newborn
August 1992
THERE IS NOT ONE moral virtue that Jesus inculcated but Plato and Cicero did inculcate before him. What then did Christ inculcate? Forgiveness of Sins. This alone is the gospel and this is the life and immortality brought to light by Jesus. Even the covenant of Jehovah, which is this: If you forgive one another your trespasses, so shall Jehovah forgive you, That he himself may dwell among you, but if you avenge, you murder the divine image and he cannot dwell among you because you murder him. He arises again and you deny that he is arisen and are blind to spirit.
You might also be interested in Gandhi on the Gita (the Bhagavad Gita) or the Ghazals of Ghalib for Hindu and Muslim perspectives on spirituality.
ISBN 978-0-942208-07-8. Edited by Sasha Newborn. $9.95
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