I just finished reading Alexander Gilchrist’s Life of William Blake because Blake is a hero of mine and the book was recommended to me as the best, tho flawed, biography. Below is a quotation from Ch 8... (I wanted to quote again & again from the volume, but, for many reasons, I did not)
Upon [John Caspar Lavater’s] aphorism: ‘Superstition always inspires littleness, religion grandeur of mind: the superstitious raises beings inferiour to himself to deities,’ Blake remarks at some length: ‘No man was ever truly superstitious who was not truly religious as far as he knew. True superstition is ignorant honesty & this is beloved of god and man. I do not allow there is such a thing as superstition taken in the strict sense of the word. A man must first decieve himself before he is thus Superstitious and so he is a hypocrite. Hipocrisy is as distant from superstition as the wolf from the lamb.’...& here is an illustration that I admire, from Blake's illustrations to Dante's Divine Comedy, which I found at the William Blake Archive:
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| Illustrations to Dante's "Divine Comedy", object 1 (Butlin 812.1) "Dante Running from the Three Beasts" |