Against all this Blake protested, but without personal heat. He was well aware of Paine's deism, when he helped him to escape to France; and of Voltaire he wrote justly: "He has sinned against the Son of man, and it shall be forgiven him." He protested and he affirmed: "Man is born a Spectre, or Satan, and is altogether an Evil." In this uncompromising affirmation, taken out of the heart of _Jerusalem_, written at the mature age of forty-seven, he cuts himself off sharply, not only from the humanitarian deism of his time, but from the pantheism that invaded so many phases of his thought; he goes beyond the kindly catholic dogma which allows a residuum of original righteousness in fallen man; and, with Whitefield and the Calvinists, denies that he has any righteousness left at all. Hence the utter failure of all empiricism, and the absolute need of Revelation and a supernatural religion. How near he was getting to Dr Johnson! Super-nature, of course, presupposes nature. Blake was obliged to contemplate Nature, and meditate on the ancient difficulties that she still presents. There are many passages in _The Four Zoas_ to show how alive he was to Nature's loveliness and cruelty. Her cruelty alone convinced him that she could not be taken as a basis for religion. A natural man building his character on a natural religion must be as cruel as his mother. The cruelty finds periodic vent in the lust of war. Yet why there is so much cruelty in Nature remains a mystery, even to the man who has been driven by her to supernaturalism. Blake maintained that there were two ways of regarding Nature. The natural man, with only five senses to inform him, looks at her and sees a very small portion of the infinite, without ever suspecting the infinite. If he sees her loveliness it will arrest him and hold him fast. The spiritual man, on the contrary, looks not at but through Nature, to the spiritual world of which it is a vegetable mirror.