en Michael promises to Adam, after his expulsion from the garden--

A Paradise within thee; happier far;

Milton must have known as well as any of his critics that this conception
of Hell and of Paradise, if insisted on, would have shattered the fabric
of his poem. His figures of Sin and Death were of his own invention, and
we must not suppose him so obtuse as never to have realised the part that
his shaping imagination bore in the presentment of other and greater
figures in the poem. In some respects he tried rather to impose a scheme
of thought and imagination upon his age than to express the ideas that he
found current. His theology and his cosmical conceptions are equally
tainted with his individual heresies. He flies in the face of the
Athanasian Creed by representing the generation of the Son as an event
occurring in time--"on such day as Heaven's great year brings forth." His
later poem of _Paradise Regained_ and the posthumous treatise of
Christian Doctrine show him an Arian; in the poem the Almighty is made to
speak of

This perfect man, by merit called my Son.

His account of the creation of the World as a mere ordering or
re-arrangement of the wild welter of an uncreated material Chaos receives
no countenance from the Fathers. In many points of theological teaching
he is compelled to form definite and even visual conceptions where
orthodoxy had cautiously confined itself to vague general propositions.
So that the description of Sin and Death and of the causeway built by
them between Hell-gates and the World, much as it has been objected to
even by admirers of the poem, is only an extreme instance of the defining
and hardening process that Milton found needful throughout for the
concrete presentment of the high doings which are his theme. He congealed
the mysteries of Time and Space, Love and Death, Sin and Forgiveness,
into a material system; and in so doing, while paying the utmost
deference to his authorities, he yet exercised many a choice with regard
to matters indifferent or undefinable. Thus, for instance, he borrows
from the Talmud the notion that Satan first learned the existence of a
prohibited tree from overhearing a conversation between Adam and Eve. He
was surely conscious of what he was doing, and would have been not
ill-pleased to learn that the Universe, as he conceived of it, has since
been called by his name. It is Milton's Paradise Lost, lost by Milton's
Adam and Eve, who are tempted