weighted men heavily, and made them
sombre. It crushed the feeble, but made strong men stronger.

The first half of the seventeenth century was full of religious
enthusiasms, which carried high expectations. Milton looked for a
wonderful advance in truth. The Puritan sought to build a church simple
in forms, austere in morals and manners, exacting personal holiness of
its members, and subjecting the ungodly to a rule of the saints. Charles
the First and Archbishop Laud believed in a religious monarchy; that the
king should be chief in church and state; that beauty of ritual should go
along with the encouragement of festivity and joyousness; and that the
ultimate aim was a reunited Christendom.

The wave passed, and these expectations had failed. But the force of the
Puritan movement had accomplished certain things. It had turned the tide
of the English civil war, it had leavened the more serious portion of the
nation, and it had planted the New England colonies.

In England the Puritan zeal gave force to overthrow despotism, but it
then plunged the nation into chaos; it could not rule or harmonize the
composite forces of national life; constitutional monarchy was
established at last under William of Orange, by men of less fervent and
lofty temper than the Puritans, but better conversant with the wants and
possibilities of the actual world.

Milton was a man of heroic mould. He governed himself by a deliberate
and lofty moral purpose. The thirst for "moral perfection" inspired and
ruled his life. He was far from the narrowness of the typical Puritan.
He was open on all sides to the noblest influences. The heroic antique
temper, the beauty and richness of the Greek, the religious seriousness
of the Puritan, the English love of freedom, all met in him. He was at
heart a poet and scholar, but he threw himself into the active life of
his time.

Yet his genius was cramped by his theology. He could not fuse the
conflicting elements of thought,--just as the heroes of the Revolution,
Pym and Hampden and Cromwell and Falkland, could not blend the elements
of English political society. He is like his own lion "struggling to get
free." His epic is a story of disaster. His deity is undivine. There
is more that touches sympathy and admiration in his Satan than in his
Jehovah or Adam.

The best thing he gives us is his own noble personality, imbuing the
majestic rhythm with a kind of moral power. Servant and