ence and Divine government were no mysteries to him.

The living Throne, the sapphire blaze,
Where angels tremble, while they gaze,
He saw;

--and he did not tremble. His persons are visible, their characters are
known, the nature of their relations is easily ascertained and expounded.
Everything, in short, is as plain as a pikestaff. So he came to picture
scenes which criticism is reluctant to traverse, and to make statements
which it is equally irreverent either to affirm or to deny.

Dr. Johnson, with a fearful and sincere piety, refused to follow Milton
into Heaven. "Of the agents in the poem," he says, "the chief are such as
it is irreverence to name on slight occasions." And again:--"The
characters in the _Paradise Lost_ which admit of examination are those of
angels and of man." It is impossible not to respect Johnson's attitude,
but later critics have found it difficult to follow his example, and
Milton himself would have been the last to claim sanctuary in Heaven for
the imaginations on which the whole fabric of the poem depends.

Coleridge is one of the very few critics who have praised the conduct of
the celestial part of the story:--"Wherever God is represented as acting
directly as Creator, without any exhibition of his own essence, Milton
adopts the simplest and sternest language of the Scriptures.... But, as
some personal interest was demanded for the purposes of poetry, Milton
takes advantage of the dramatic representation of God's address to the
Son, the Filial Alterity, and in _those addresses_ slips in, as it were
by stealth, language of affection, or thought, or sentiment.... He was
very wise in adopting the strong anthropomorphism of the Hebrew
Scriptures at once." Yet this is hardly an answer to the chief objections
that have been urged against Milton's conduct of the poem. These are
grounded, not on his adoption of the strong anthropomorphism of the
Hebrew Scriptures, but on the nature of the matter that he slips in, "as
if by stealth," and the character that he attributes to his Divine
persons. Had he been a pagan, pure and simple, he might have been frankly
and explicitly materialistic in his conceptions. Had he been touched by
the spirit of the greatest of Christian poets, he might have shrouded the
Godhead in a mystery of silence and light. But he had something to prove
to the men of his own time, and neither course served him.

Milton's theodicy is of his own devising, and is neithe