blame in this
matter than he deserves. Divine tyranny with hell as its sanction was
no invention of his. The Catholic Church, as all her art shows, had
always made full use of it. And the new horror of his own day, the
Calvinist predestination, he expressly and frequently repudiates. The
free will of man is the very base of his system. In it men may suffer,
as it seems to us, out of all proportion to their guilt; but at least
they suffer only for deeds done of their own free will.

But the true answer to the charge of corrupting English religious
thought so often brought against Milton is that while the harm he did
must be admitted it was far outweighed by the good. It could not be
for nothing that generations of readers, as they turned over Milton's
pages, found themselves listening to the voice of a man to whom God's
presence was the most constant of realities, the most active of daily
and hourly influences: who, from his youth up, visibly glowed with an
ardent desire for the service of God and man: who, whatever his faults
were, had nothing {147} base or mean about him, habitually thought of
life as a thing to be lived on the heights, and by his exalted spirit
and unconquerable will enlarges for those who know him the whole
conception of what a human being may achieve. It could not be for
nothing that on the topmost heights of English poetry stood a man who
could scarcely finish a single one of his poems without some soaring
ascent to heaven and heavenly things: whose most characteristic
utterances for himself are such lines as

"Toward which Time leads me, and the will of Heaven";

or--

"As ever in my great Task-Master's eye:"

and for others as well as for himself such a hope as that which
concludes his _At a Solemn Music_--

"O, may we soon again renew that song,
And keep in tune with Heaven, till God ere long
To his celestial concert us unite,
To live with Him, and sing in endless morn of light!"

_Tu habe Deum prae oculis tuis_, says the author of _The Imitation_:
"Have thou God {148} before Thine eyes." And so by his poetry and by
his life says Milton. The influence of such a man, whatever the faults
of his intellectual creed, can hardly on the whole have been anything
but a good one, either on those who heard his living voice or on those
who for two hundred years have caught what they may of it from the
printed pages of his books.

So much it seemed worth while to say in defen