Renan, pantheist, artist and sceptic, tried to supply a subjective artistic explanation which soothed the subject, but turned the Object into a Frenchman. Strauss, Keim and Bousset, learned and painstaking, with hardly less success made Him into a dreamy cosmopolitan German of a now obsolete type. Schweitzer, better informed of the apocalyptic and eschatological medium through which the mind of Jesus worked, comes nearer to the apostolic mind that drew the picture of Jesus, yet, for want of the key, portrays Jesus as the tragic victim of the illusory time-spirit. Swedenborg never gave any serious consideration to the catholic theory, but supplied its place out of the store of his supersensual revelations. Loaded with these, and with a vague memory of the gnostic teaching of the threefold meaning of the Scriptures, he was able to evade every literal difficulty by turning to the spiritual meaning, and if need be to the celestial, which could be reached only through his own specific revelation. It is true that he tried to bring a steadying factor into his subjective interpretation by introducing his doctrine of correspondences; but as he has never been able to convince any but his elect followers that his correspondences, beyond some obvious ones, are other than arbitrary, he has succeeded only in making his commentaries on Genesis, Exodus, and the Apocalypse unreadable to the vast majority of Christians. I have said enough about Swedenborg to make it clear that there was some affinity between him and Blake. Blake's imperfect knowledge of him was much deepened in 1788, when he read his _Angelic Wisdom concerning the Divine Love and concerning the Divine Wisdom_. This he marked and annotated, and so we are able to trace the affinity in considerable detail. On the whole Blake gives almost passionate approval to _The Angelic Wisdom_. Only in rare instances does he differ. Swedenborg's doctrine of state made explicit what Blake had vaguely perceived all his life. It also helped him to formulate a theoretic explanation of his own supersensual vision. This is so important that I must quote an entire paragraph from _The Angelic Wisdom_, for the sake of Blake's comment and the reader's understanding.