Faith & Spirit Quote by William Blake

Blake swings his blade at religious entitlement, not at Judaism as a people. The line is deliberately barbed: it names “the Jews” first because Christian Europe had spent centuries training itself to hear Jewish particularism as the original sin. Then, with a swift turn, Blake boomerangs the accusation back onto “Christians,” exposing how easily a critique of one tradition becomes a mirror for the dominant one. The rhetorical trick is the point. He uses the era’s familiar anti-Jewish trope only to indict the majority who repeat it.

The specific intent is theological and political at once. Blake’s Christianity is allergic to institutions that treat God like property and salvation like a gated community. “Assumed a right” frames election not as mystery or covenant but as a legal claim, the language of possession. “Exclusively” is the accelerant: the sin isn’t faithfulness to a tradition, but converting spiritual inheritance into monopoly. The phrase “lasting witness” has courtroom sting, suggesting history itself will testify against any group that turns grace into privilege.

Context matters: Blake writes in a Britain steeped in Protestant supremacy, empire, and anxiety about outsiders, including Jews who were slowly reentering public life after centuries of exclusion. He’s also writing against church moralism and the commodification of piety. The subtext is that Christians, armed with a universalizing gospel, have often been even more aggressive about claiming divine benefits for themselves - and denying them to others. Blake’s line doesn’t flatter liberal tolerance; it warns that the urge to hoard God is a recurring, bipartisan human impulse, especially in religions that imagine themselves chosen.