ps the long
pleading there made in answer to the challenge of Christ, and its tone of
unutterable despair is deepened by the terrible severity of the speech
made in answer.

The other leaders of the rebel troops take little part in the action
outside the scene of the Infernal Council. In his memories of the Long
Parliament Milton could easily find examples of the types he has embodied
under the names of Belial, Mammon, Moloch, and Beelzebub. Nor has he
forgotten the Westminster Assembly of divines. The precise employments of
that historic body are described by him as the recreation of the lost
spirits:--

Others apart sat on a hill retired,
In thoughts more elevate, and reasoned high
Of Providence, Foreknowledge, Will, and Fate--
Fixed fate, free will, foreknowledge absolute--
And found no end, in wandering mazes lost.

It ill became Milton to cast contempt on these reasonings, seeing that a
whole system of them was necessary for the argument of his poem. He is so
little of a philosopher that he seems hardly to be conscious of the
difficulties of his own theory. Both in _Paradise Lost_ and in the
_Treatise of Christian Doctrine_ he enlarges with much dogmatism and some
arrogance on the difference between foreknowledge and foreordination. He
rejects predestination decisively, but he not only does not answer, he
does not even so much as mention, the difficulty that arises in
attempting to distinguish between what is foreordained by Omniscience and
what is foreknown by Omnipotence. Pope compared some of the speeches
delivered in Heaven to the arguments of a "School-divine." The comparison
does injustice to the scholastic philosophers. There was never one of
them who could have walked into a metaphysical bramble-bush with the
blind recklessness that Milton displays.

It is time to return to Eden and its inhabitants. They have little to do
but "to lop and prune and prop and bind," to adore their Maker, and to
avoid the prohibited tree. It would perhaps have been impossible for a
poet with more dramatic genius than Milton to make these favourites of
Heaven interesting in their happy state, while yet the key that was to
admit them to our world of adventure and experience, of suffering and
achievement, hung untouched on a tree. And Adam, from the wealth of his
inexperience, is lavishly sententious; when anything is to do, even if it
is only to go to sleep, he does it in a high style, and makes a speech.
Milton p