Life & Wisdom Quote by William Blake

Blake lands the line like a thrown brick: not at Christianity’s founder, but at the institutions that claim his name while perfecting the machinery of punishment. The “crucifix” is doing double duty here. It’s a devotional object, a symbol meant to evoke mercy and identification with the condemned. But in Blake’s hands it becomes a bureaucratic stamp, a piece of moral paperwork that allows the state to kill with a clean conscience.

The specific intent is accusatory and strategic. Blake doesn’t argue against execution by tallying policy failures; he exposes a theological perversion. If Christ is the executed innocent, then invoking his death to legitimize more executions is grotesque. The subtext is that a culture can metabolize even its most radical symbols into fuel for control. The cross, once a scandal against imperial violence, becomes the imperial alibi.

Context matters: late-18th and early-19th century England is marked by the “Bloody Code,” where a vast range of crimes could be punished by hanging. Public executions functioned as theater, moral pedagogy, and state intimidation rolled into one. Blake, who detested moralistic authority and defended the energy of the human spirit against “prudence,” sees the hypocrisy: the same society that sentimentalizes Christ’s suffering treats living sufferers as disposable.

The line works because it’s not abstractly pious; it’s forensic. “Shall be made” points to a process, a deliberate conversion of compassion into justification. Blake’s cynicism is prophetic: the holiest symbol can be repurposed into the sharpest weapon.