t his purpose
To use him further yet in some great service.

The theme of _Samson Agonistes_ had thus already taken possession of
Milton's imagination when he wrote his first prose tractates. But the
same writings furnish even stronger evidence of his early dallyings with
the theme of _Paradise Lost_. "It was from out the rind of one apple
tasted," he says in the _Areopagitica_, "that the knowledge of good and
evil, as two twins cleaving together, leaped forth into the world." And
again, in _The Doctrine and Discipline of Divorce_:--"The academics and
stoics ... knew not what a consummate and most adorned Pandora was
bestowed upon Adam, to be the nurse and guide of his arbitrary happiness
and perseverance, I mean, his native innocence and perfection, which
might have kept him from being our true Epimetheus." Some of these
references show the imaginative scheme of the _Paradise Lost_ in the
process of building. In one passage, for instance, of the last quoted
treatise, Milton expounds the pagan belief that God punishes his enemies
most when he throws them furthest from him:--"Which then they held he
did, when he blinded, hardened, and stirred up his offenders, to finish
and pile up their desperate work since they had undertaken it. To banish
for ever into a local hell, whether in the air or in the centre, or in
that uttermost and bottomless gulf of chaos, deeper from holy bliss than
the world's diameter multiplied, they thought not a punishing so proper
and proportionate for God to inflict as to punish sin with sin." It would
seem as if the poet had not as yet fixed the situation of his local hell,
but remained suspended between rival theories. The other idea, of the
Divine permission and impulse given to hardened sinners, finds a
conspicuous place in the poem. In one instance, at least, a figure drawn
from the story of the Creation is violently handled to serve strange
uses. The evolution of the four elements from the chaotic welter of hot,
cold, moist, and dry, is adduced as a proof that the laws of God and of
nature approve free divorce:--"By his divorcing command the world first
rose out of chaos, nor can be renewed again out of confusion, but by the
separating of unmeet consorts."

Allusions of this kind occur most frequently in the earlier prose
writings, while the studies that had been interrupted by controversy were
yet fresh in Milton's memory. They would hardly be worth the quotation,
were it not that they a