n his ears. What Homer was to his people and to his language, he would be
to his; and this was the lower vocation--glorious as earthly things may be
glorious--and self-respecting while he thought of his own head as of one
that shall be laurel-bound; yet magnanimous and public-spirited, while he
trusted to shed upon his language and upon his country the beams of his
own fame. This, we say, was his lower vocation, taken among thoughts and
feelings high but merely human. But a higher one accompanied it. The sense
of a sanctity native to the human soul, and indestructible--the assiduous
hallowing of himself, and of all his powers, by religious offices that
seek nothing lower than communion with the fountain-head of all holiness
and of all good. And Milton, labouring "in the eye of his great
taskmaster"--trained by all recluse and silent studies--trained by the
turmoil raging around him of the times, and by his own share in the
general contention--according to the self-dedication of his mind trained
within the temple--he, stricken with darkness, and amidst the gloom of
extinguished earthly hopes, assumed the singing robes of the poet.

The purpose of the Paradise Lost is wholly religious. He strikes the
loudest, and, at the same time, the sweetest-toned harp of the Muse with
the hand of a Christian theologian. He girds up all the highest powers of
the human mind to wrestling with the most arduous question with which the
human faculties can engage--the all-involving question--How is the world
governed? Do we live under chance, or fate, or Providence? Is there a God?
And is he holy, loving, wise, and just? He will

"Assert eternal providence,
And justify the ways of God to man."

The justifying answer he reads in the Scriptures. Man fell, tempted from
without by another, but by the act of his own free-will, and by his own
choice. Thus, according to the theology of Milton, is the divine Rule of
the universe completely justified in the sin into which man has fallen--in
the punishment which has fallen upon man. The Justice of God is cleared.
And his Love? That shines out, when man has perversely fallen, by the
Covenant of Mercy, by finding out for him a Redeemer. And thus the two
events in the history of mankind, which the Scriptures present as
infinitely surpassing all others in importance, which are cardinal to the
destinies of the human race, upon which all our woe, and, in the highest
sense, all our weal are hung,