pt the
guardian angels who were sent down from Heaven for the protection and
education of the increasing race of men. In this attempt also he
succeeded; "the sons of God saw the daughters of men that they were fair,
and they took them wives of all which they chose." And they forgot their
heavenly estate, and made for themselves a Godless dominion upon Earth.
This is the Fall of the Angels as it is narrated at greater length in the
recently recovered apocryphal _Book of Enoch_, and alluded to, perhaps in
the Epistles of Peter and of Jude, where are mentioned "the angels that
sinned," and "the angels which kept not their first estate." Milton's
version brings these angels to the earth, not as protectors of mankind,
but as conquerors come from Hell, to possess and occupy the spacious
world delivered over to them by the victory of Satan. From that point
forward, however, he adopts the tradition whereby Jerome, Lactantius, and
others had identified the fallen angels with the gods of the heathen.
Whether as conquerors or as corrupted guardians of the human race, they
seek the same ends,--to divert worship from the true God, and by the
destruction of man, to contrive a solace for their own perdition. They
are the inventors of astrology, sooth-saying, divination, necromancy, and
black magic; they were once the ministers of God, and still have a
presentiment of his acts, so that they can sometimes speak truly of the
future by means of oracles and magicians, claiming the while the credit
of bringing that to pass which in fact they only foresaw. Milton, in
adopting this doctrine, merely followed current belief, and did not, as
De Quincey seems to think, hit upon it by a fortunate stroke of genius.
He might have found it incidentally but fully set forth in so recent a
book as Hooker's _Ecclesiastical Polity_, I. iv. "The fall of the angels,
therefore," says Hooker, "was pride. Since their fall, their practices
have been the clean contrary unto those just mentioned. For, being
dispersed, some in the air, some in the earth, some in the water, some
among the minerals, dens, and caves that are under the earth; they have
by all means laboured to effect a universal rebellion against the laws,
and as far as in them lieth utter destruction of the works of God. These
wicked spirits the heathen honoured instead of Gods, both generally under
the name of _dii inferi_, 'gods infernal,' and particularly, some in
oracles, some in idols, some as hou