There is no such compromise between religious creeds in Milton’s mind as he saw good to make between Ptolemy and Copernicus.  The matter was, in his estimation, far too serious.  Never was there a more unaccountable misstatement than Ruskin’s, that “Paradise Lost” is a poem in which every artifice of invention is consciously employed—­not a single fact being conceived as tenable by any living faith.  Milton undoubtedly believed most fully in the actual existence of all his chief personages, natural and supernatural, and was sure that, however he might have indulged his imagination in the invention of incidents, he had represented character with the fidelity of a conscientious historian.  His religious views, moreover, are such as he could never have thought it right to publish if he had not been intimately convinced of their truth.  He has strayed far from the creed of Puritanism.  He is an Arian; his Son of God, though an unspeakably exalted being, is dependent, inferior, not self-existent, and could be merged in the Father’s person or obliterated entirely without the least diminution of Almighty perfection.  He is, moreover, no longer a Calvinist:  Satan and Adam both possess free will, and neither need have fallen.  The reader must accept these views, as well as Milton’s conception of the materiality of the spiritual world, if he is to read to good purpose.  “If his imagination,” says Pattison, pithily, “is not active enough to assist the poet, he must at least not resist him.”

This is excellent advice as respects the general plan of “Paradise Lost,” the materiality of its spiritual personages, and its system of philosophy and theology.  Its poetical beauties can only be resisted where they are not perceived.  They have repeated the miracles of Orpheus and Amphion, metamorphosing one most bitterly obnoxious, of whom so late as 1687 a royalist wrote that “his fame is gone out like a candle in a snuff, and his memory will always stink,” into an object of universal veneration.  From the first instant of perusal the imagination is led in captivity, and for the first four books at least stroke upon stroke of sublimity follows with such continuous and undeviating regularity that sublimity seems this Creation’s first law, and we feel like pigmies transported to a world of giants.  There is nothing forced or affected in this grandeur, no visible effort, no barbaric profusion, everything proceeds with a severe and majestic order, controlled by the strength that called it into being.  The similes and other poetical ornaments, though inexpressibly magnificent, seem no more so than the greatness of the general conception demands.  Grant that Satan in his fall is not “less than archangel ruined,” and it is no exaggeration but the simplest truth to depict his mien—­

                “As when the sun, new risen,
    Looks through the horizontal misty air,
    Shorn of his beams; or from behind the moon,
    In dim eclipse, disastrous twilight sheds
    On half the nations.”