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(Jerusalem, f. 91, ll. 1–30.)
IT is easier to forgive an Enemy than to forgive a Friend. | |
| The man who permits you to injure him deserves your vengeance; | |
| He also will receive it. Go, Spectre! obey my most secret desire, | |
| Which thou knowest without my speaking. Go to these Friends of Righteousness, | |
| Tell them to obey their Humanities, and not pretend Holiness, | 5 |
| When they are murderers. As far as my Hammer and Anvil permit, | |
| Go tell them that the Worship of God is honouring His gifts | |
| In other men, and loving the greatest men best, each according | |
| To his Genius, which is the Holy Ghost in Man: there is no other | |
| God than that God who is the intellectual fountain of Humanity. | 10 |
| He who envies or calumniates, which is murder and cruelty, | |
| Murders the Holy One. Go tell them this, and overthrow their cup, | |
| Their bread, their altar-table, their incense, and their oath, | |
| Their marriage and their baptism, their burial and consecration. | |
| I have tried to make friends by corporeal gifts, but have only | 15 |
| Made enemies; I never made friends but by spiritual gifts, | |
| By severe contentions of friendship, and the burning fire of thought. | |
| He who would see the Divinity must see Him in His Children, | |
| One first in friendship and love, then a Divine Family, and in the midst | |
| Jesus will appear. So he who wishes to see a Vision, a perfect Whole, | 20 |
| Must see it in its Minute Particulars, organized; and not as thou, | |
| O Fiend of Righteousness, pretendest! thine is a disorganized | |
| And snowy cloud, brooder of tempests and destructive War. | |
| You smile with pomp and rigour, you talk of benevolence and virtue; | |
| I act with benevolence and virtue, and get murder’d time after time; | 25 |
| You accumulate Particulars, and murder by analysing, that you | |
| May take the aggregate, and you call the aggregate Moral Law; | |
| And you call that swell’d and bloated Form a Minute Particular. | |
| But General Forms have their vitality in Particulars; and every | |
| Particular is a Man, a Divine Member of the Divine Jesus. | 30 |
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