Blake’s sentence from The Marriage of Heaven and Hell, which Neville uses more often than almost any other quotation in the corpus, as the ground for there being no second party anywhere. God is not a passive observer of the pageant: he is the supreme actor in it, and he acts and exists nowhere but in men. The consequences Neville draws are deliberately uncomfortable and he never softens them. The being who played the thief and the being who played the judge that sentenced him are the same being. The man shooting the culprit picked up as a spy and the man against whom the order is executed are the same being. Stalin and the Pope are played by the same being - you might be shocked, he says, but there is no other being to play the part. And in the room where he is speaking there is only one being present, so the one listening and the one speaking are one and the same. It is also why no one can be blamed (M182): blame requires an other, and the whole argument is that there is none - when man thinks he got the better of another, who is fooling whom? The quotation varies slightly between tellings, sometimes with 'all existing beings' and sometimes without the 'all', and both forms occur in this one lecture. NOTE FOR THE ATTACH LANES: the phrase occurs in about forty-five lectures, which is far more than I have verified. It is a fixed quotation and its sense is stable, but please check that it is being used for the no-other-actor claim rather than quoted in passing, and keep it distinct from M715 (the cast and the parts), which is the elaboration this sentence is the premise of.