ears as a compliment paid to Satan, a
counter-move devised after the suppression of the great rebellion. The
Omnipotent thus declares his intention:--

But, lest his heart exalt him in the harm
Already done, to have dispeopled Heaven--
My damage fondly deemed,--I can repair
That detriment, if such it be to lose
Self-lost, and in a moment will create
Another world; out of one man a race
Of men innumerable.

This last is the account we must accept. Milton no doubt was attracted by
the dramatic superiority of this version, which makes the Creation of Man
a minor incident in the great war, so that the human race comes, a mere
token and pawn--

Between the pass and fell incensed points
Of mighty opposites.

But he was probably also aware that this view had not the highest warrant
of orthodoxy.

There is something absurd, perhaps even something repulsive, to the
modern mind in this careful, matter-of-fact anatomy of Milton's poem. But
it is a useful and necessary exercise, for all his greatest effects are
achieved in the realm of the physical and moral sublime, where the moral
relations are conditioned chiefly by the physical. There is no
metaphysic, nothing spiritual, nothing mysterious, except in name,
throughout the whole poem. The so-called spiritual beings are as
definitely embodied as man. The rules that Milton followed in dealing
with his heavenly essences are very fully laid down in the _Treatise of
Christian Doctrine_. He consigned the Fathers to limbo, and built up his
entire system from the words of Scripture. Now the Scriptures, in a
hundred passages, attribute human passions and actions to Divine beings.
We have no choice, said Milton, but to accept these expressions as the
truest to which we can attain. "If after the work of six days it be said
of God that 'He rested and was refreshed,' _Exodus_, xxxi. 17; if it be
said that 'He feared the wrath of the enemy,' _Deuteronomy_, xxxii. 27;
let us believe that it is not beneath the dignity of God ... to be
refreshed in that which refresheth Him, or to fear in that He feareth."
Milton had here the sharp logical dilemma that he loved. Either these
expressions are literally true, or they are not. If they are, well and
good; if they are not, how can we hope to frame for ourselves better and
truer notions of the Deity than those which he has dictated to us as
within the reach of our understanding, and fit and proper for us to
entertain? So also