Justice & Law Quote by William Blake

Blake hammers a political and spiritual indictment into two terse blows. Stones of Law and bricks of religion are heavy, dead, man-handled matter, cut and fired into rigid blocks. Stack them high enough and you do not build a living community; you build cages. Law, when severed from imagination and mercy, ossifies into punishment and surveillance. Religion, when hardened into dogma, polices desire until desire returns as commerce and hypocrisy. The very institutions that claim to restrain vice and violence manufacture the conditions for them.

The line belongs to The Marriage of Heaven and Hell, where Blake upends pious maxims through the voice of Hell to reclaim energy, imagination, and desire as divine. He sees the world as a dance of contraries: energy and reason, body and soul, mercy and judgment. When one pole is enthroned and the other repressed, society does not become holy; it becomes sick. Legalism without vision breeds prisons, not justice. Piety without love breeds brothels, not chastity.

The image also fits the London Blake knew in the 1790s: the Bloody Code hanged thieves for trifles, debtors rotted in cells, child labor was sanctified by a Church tied to the state, and prostitution thrived under a veneer of moralism. He elsewhere speaks of mind-forg’d manacles and of a youthful harlot’s curse blighting the marriage hearse, linking sexual repression, disease, and social decay. The symmetry of stones and bricks hints that both law and religion, in their institutional forms, are human constructions claiming divine necessity while producing human misery.

There is irony and warning here. A society that treats virtue as enforcement and holiness as prohibition will find itself surrounded by the very evils it feared, only systematized and monetized. Blake urges a reimagining from the root: justice animated by mercy, faith animated by love, bodies and souls not split but married, so that the materials of collective life are not dead blocks but living forms.