William Blake's works stand as powerful testimony to the proposition that all writing—indeed all art—is inherently political, no matter how innocuous or esoteric its subject matter may appear to be, whether to the eyes of the artist's contemporaries. The appropriation of the Bible and its redeployment for manifestly political ends lies at the heart of the "perversion" Blake decries. The oppositional politics extends further, to the prevailing established political parties and factions and, beyond them, to the cultural, intellectual, and artistic ideologies to which they supply the public political counterparts. Blake's point seems to have been that, read correctly—that is, in its infernal or diabolical sense—the Bible of Heaven was indeed capable of serving as guide, comfort, and prophecy to the people. Blake seems to have no doubt that the Bible is a "text" that is political and that, furthermore, the Bible has been put to increasingly and perniciously political uses.