Blake's voyage of rediscovery began during the Reign of Terror. The new teachers, like Swedenborg and Godwin, Tom Paine and Mary Wollstonecraft, failed to satisfy his own craving for expression. The Reign of Terror appalled him when it showed him his principle at work in the proletariat. Then it was that turning again to the Evangelists he made the wonderful discovery, which later apostles of the _ego_ have not made, that Jesus Christ was the perfect example and embodiment of his vision. He had pictured to himself a man, impelled by a creative passion, whose character in every part should be manifestly the outcome of fiery energy. And there was the Man in the Subject of the Gospels. But he saw that Jesus Christ could not be labelled or classed. There was egoistic self-expression in Him, and there was self-renunciation. Somehow He had altogether escaped the modern dilemma of self-expression or self-sacrifice. Both were magnificently present in Him and united, because His self-expression was resting on His self-surrender to God. Give up God, and man swings perpetually between duty to neighbour and duty to self. Believe in and surrender to God, and each falls into its proper place. This was not the only synthesis in the character of Jesus. He was a union of all possible contraries. Gentleness and fierceness; non-resistance and aggressive force; non-resentment and fiery invective; forgiveness and severe justice, haughty pride and lowliness; self-confidence and utter dependence upon God, all were in Jesus. Henceforth Blake could keep his vision of Jesus and his vision of art, for they were one. The next stage in rediscovery was to find out what the great body of dogmatic truth had affirmed about Jesus down the Christian centuries. Here he made little progress. He probably felt, as we all do at times, that the simplicity of the gospel was lost in the maze of dogmatic subtleties. The negative aspect of dogma, that it rules out all that would infringe on that simplicity, never occurred to him. His mind was governed and distracted by Hindoo pantheism, and catholic anthropomorphism filtered and diluted through Swedenborg. Even after he had repudiated Swedenborg the distraction remained. His new understanding of Christ taught him that he must accept the ultimate antinomy of good and evil, and that therefore Christ's heaven and hell must remain; but the pantheism never abated its watery flood, and the emphatic catholic teaching of transcendence and immanence gained no sufficient hold to deliver his mind.