On the other hand, a reader might theorize that Blake intends to portray the child as precocious and with intentions to dissent from Church teaching-perhaps the Priest thinks so. The little boy is peremptorily castigated as a heretic and summarily burned at the stake, even though the child's age-he is a little boy, after all he sees the world through the eyes of a child's innocence-would seemingly preclude him from comprehending the awful construing of his words (by the Priest) as heresy. Reacting to his speech, a zealot Priest leaps to denounce the boy and to dramatize his offense. In this poem, Blake's titular character, a little boy, appears, by lights of Church pedantry, to have questioned religious dogma, to wit: that every person must love God more than themselves or any other for his sacrilege the boy has instantly become "lost" to the Church.
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