However, what Blake seems to be saying within the third stanza is that, these qualities are equivalent to a man’s by personifying them and relating them to the characteristics of a human. By doing this, Blake is trying to show that these aren’t just God’s qualities but his actual substance (his being). These virtues are what we think of God to be, and therefore, is God himself. However looking more deeply into the poem, perhaps Blake has personified these characteristics because he is trying to say God is modelled on the ideal human (for we all aspire to be merciful, peaceful, loving and sympathetic). Blake says on line 15, “we pray to the human form divine”. This seems to be saying that when we pray, we pray to the ideal ‘human’ which means God is an image of man, rather than what the Bible promotes: that we are an image of God. Perhaps Blake is trying to say that God is, in fact, a mental distorted image. However, this interpretation does seem to differ from Blake’s religious beliefs and now that I think about it, it doesn’t seem that Blake would have intended such a agnostic interpretation in his ‘innocence’ collection. Perhaps Blake is trying to express the idea of Jesus.
Mercy, Pity, Peace and Love are all virtues of Jesus’ preaching. Also, by showing that God can be found in human characteristics (Stanza 3), he is trying to express Jesus as the mediator between God and Man. However, though there are references as Jesus being in human form (line 13 and 17), the rest of the poem remains quite abstract showing that it is difficult to distinguish between mortality and the divine.
The final stanza seems upbeat and pleasant - making the poem appropriate to innocence by saying that we “all must love the human form” because we are all an image of God, no matter our background or ethnicity (which is the traditional Christian view). Although the second from last line (“Where mercy, love and pity dwell, There God is dwelling too”) seems to contradict this view by saying that instead of us being a form of God, God can actually be found in us through these virtues.
Blake does not explicitly talks about Christ in this poem, but rather the four virtues that Blake assigns alternately to man and God are the ones conventionally associated with Jesus. Because Christ was both God and man, he becomes the vehicle for Blake’s mediation between the two. But the fact that he is given an abstract rather than a human figuration underscores the elaborate intellectualization involved in Christian doctrine. Blake himself favors a more direct identification between what is human and what is divine. Thus the companion poem in Songs of Experience, “The Human Abstract,” goes further toward exposing the elaborate institutions of religion as mental confabulations that obscure rather than honor the true identity of God and man.