hey are seldom or never dramatically convincing. Our
Lord, in particular, instead of the gracious and winning figure of the
Gospels, becomes a kind of self-sufficient aristocratic moralist. His
speeches, as Milton gives them, display rather the defiant virtue of
the Stoic, or the self-conscious righteousness of the Pharisee, than
the simple and loving charity of the Christian. The weapon of moral
and intellectual contempt, so freely employed in them and so natural
both to Jew and to Greek, strikes to us a false and jarring note when
put into the mouth of Him who taught His disciples that the only way of
entry into His kingdom was that of being born again and becoming as
little children.

These are all serious drawbacks and they are not the only ones. If
from one point of view Milton in _Paradise Regained_ is too little of a
Christian, from another he is too much. One of the gravest
difficulties with which Christian apologists have always had to contend
is the entire indifference of the New Testament and, generally
speaking, of the {203} Church in all ages, especially the most devout,
not only to economic and material progress, but to all elements except
the ethical and spiritual in the higher civilization of humanity. At
its friendliest the Church has hardly ever been willing to allow to
such things any inherent or independent importance of their own. Those
who feel that they owe an incalculable debt to art and poetry and
philosophy and therefore to the Greeks, have inevitably found this
attitude a stumbling-block. And they will always read with exceptional
surprise and indignation the narrow obscurantism of the speech which
Milton, scholar and artist as he was, is not ashamed to put into the
mouth of Christ in the fourth book. He cannot himself have been a
victim of the shallow fallacy expressed in line 325 (he who reads gets
little benefit unless he brings judgment to his reading "and what he
brings what need he elsewhere seek?"); and his lifelong practice shows
that he did not think Greek poetry was

"Thin-sown with aught of profit or delight."

Nor could he have seriously thought that the Hebrew prophets taught
"the solid rules of civil government," of which in fact they knew
nothing except on the moral side, better than the statesmen and
philosophers of Rome and {204} Athens. The explanation is, perhaps,
partly that Milton was an Arian, and therefore felt at liberty to
emphasize the Jewish limitation