nd he did so after the cold fashion of a
lawyer defining rights on each side, and assuming that the stronger
party will exert his strength. So far as his genius made his readers
accept his views of the relation between God and man it cannot be
denied that he did a great injury to English religious thought.
Everybody who stops to reflect now feels that the attitude of his God
to the rebel angels and to man is hard and unforgiving, below the
standard of any decent human morality, far below the Christian charity
of St. Paul. The atmosphere of the poem when it deals with these
matters is often suggestive of a tyrant's attorney-general whose
business is to find plausible excuses for an arbitrary despot. Milton
had his share in creating that bad sort of fear of God which is always
appearing as the thorn in the theological rose-bed of the eighteenth
century, and, later on, becomes the nightmare of the Evangelical
revival. None of these conceptions, the capricious despot, the
remorseless creditor, the Judge whose {145} invariable sentence is hell
fire, have proved easy to get rid of: and part of their permanence may
be laid to the account of _Paradise Lost_.

But Milton, who is like the Bible in so many ways, is not least like it
in his happy unconsciousness of his own immorality. The writer of the
story of Samuel and Agag, or that of Rebekah and Jacob, was perfectly
unaware that he was immoral: and so was Milton in _Paradise Lost_: and
so also and for that very reason were the majority of their readers.
Happily most of us when we read a book that makes for righteousness are
like children reading Shakspeare, who simply do not notice the things
that make their elders nervous. It is not that we refuse the evil and
choose the good: we are quite unaware of the presence of the evil at
all. No doubt that sometimes makes its influence the more powerful
because unperceived: and for this kind of subtle influence both Milton
and the Old Testament have to answer. But with many happy natures an
escape is made by the process of selection: and, as they manage to
acquire the God-fearing righteousness of the Old Testament without its
ferocity, so they manage to receive from Milton his high emotional
consciousness of life as the glad and {146} free service of God and to
ignore altogether his intellectual description of it as a very
one-sided bargain with a very dangerous Potentate.

Nor must Milton be made, as he often is, to bear more