_Jerusalem_ and _The Four Zoas_ should be studied together. The latter was begun about 1795, and rewritten at Felpham. The early prophetic books--_Urizen_, _Los_--stand as preliminary sketches to this large poem. They are woven into it with scarcely a change of word. Blake's great scheme is mainly in line with historical Christianity, which of course is catholicism. He starts with the eternal order and unity. Without attempting to explain the origin of evil, he narrates the fall out of unity and order into diversity and disorder, and how as a consequence of the fall creation appears. He is obliged to use the word "creation," but there is no real creation in his cosmogony. There are only three possible theories of creation. Creation from within God, which is pantheism, and makes the universe an emanation; creation from something outside of God, which is dualism, and not likely to be accepted in the West; and creation out of nothing, which is catholicism. Blake learnt from Swedenborg the emanative theory. Swedenborg tried to avoid the pantheistic conclusion of his foundation principle, and believed that he had succeeded. His doctrine of the human God was certainly fine, and nearly catholic. Blake sways between the two. His doctrine of creation is pantheistic, but his affirmation that "God doth a human form display to those that dwell in realms of day" is splendidly catholic, and so, on the whole, is his doctrine of the fall. Since Blake's day the problem has become enormously complicated, because we have to take account of the vestiges in man's body of an animal ancestry, and the still more infallible signs in his soul of a divine origin. Perhaps we shall eventually all come to believe in both evolution and a special creation to account for man's unique place in the universe. At any rate a denial of the fall involves a definite departure from historical Christianity, and it is important to see that it was an integral part of Blake's scheme and without it that scheme falls to pieces. Not that he pressed the letter of the Adam and Eve story. It stood for him as a divinely simple witness of an ancient simplicity and unity from which man has departed by disobedience and the assertion of a life and a self independent of God. His way back into unity is by the cross of Jesus Christ, where the self-hood dies, and the day of judgment, which finally separates in him the gold from the dross, and presents him in his divine humanity perfect before the human-divine God. Between these two stupendous facts--the fall and the redemption--Blake finds a place to say all that he wishes about the manifold things of heaven and earth and hell. The unity from which man departs is made up of four mighty ones--the Four Zoas--who are the four beasts of the Apocalypse, taken from the four beasts of Ezekiel, who probably appropriated four of the many monstrous symbolical beasts of Assyria.