ld escape the painful requirements of our lives, we would be released from that fate ridden place. For Blake, the work of John Milton freed him from so many requirements; having lost and then regained paradise he was cleared to take the next step into Jerusalem. As for the rest of the sons of Albion, we have to find our own gate through temporary necessity. It is in the final chapter that Blake removes that last of the stops that limited the force of his fire against the proponents of Natural Religion. In the brief poem addressed, “To the Christians,” that opens Chapter four, Blake reminds us of Jesus on the cross, with his cry of, “Saul, Saul, Why persecutest thou me?(77:3)” This Saul is not the scourge of first century AD Christians, but the Church of Paul, under who’s weight all of spiritual England is crushed. Blake’s Jerusalem cannot be found in visions of Tintern or Westminster Abbeys, he travels the road in search of Jesus only in order to kill him. Any Jesus on the road must not have come from inside, and as thus must perish. It is a belief in the supreme power of the Imagination, in the ability of every person, be they from Canaan, England, or Mexico to arrive in their own Jerusalem. Such is the hope that ends the final work in the Blake canon:Human Forms identified, living, going forth, & returning weariedInto the Planetary lives of Years, Months, Days & Hours; reposing,And the Awaking into his Bosom in the Life of Immortality.(99:2)It is the honoring of humanity, the same humanity, the same England that Blake pours contempt on throughout the poem. They have passed through the smaller sphere of Innocence and Experience, and move forward to the sphere of living then returning to Beulah. Blake himself went out from Eden, danced with Milton, Shakespeare, Chaucer, and Cowper, and returned to Beulah, to England for rest and when he rose found himself in Immortality- in Jerusalem....
