Educated by such a strife to power--and not more sublimely gifted than strenuously exercised--Milton had constantly carried in his soul the twofold consciousness of the highest destination. He knew himself born a great poet; and the names of great poets sounding through all time, rang in his ears. What Homer was to his people and to his language, he would be to his; and this was the lower vocation--glorious as earthly things may be glorious--and self-respecting while he thought of his own head as of one that shall be laurel-bound; yet magnanimous and public-spirited, while he trusted to shed upon his language and upon his country the beams of his own fame. This, we say, was his lower vocation, taken among thoughts and feelings high but merely human. But a higher one accompanied it. The sense of a sanctity native to the human soul, and indestructible--the assiduous hallowing of himself, and of all his powers, by religious offices that seek nothing lower than communion with the fountain-head of all holiness and of all good. And Milton, labouring "in the eye of his great taskmaster"--trained by all recluse and silent studies--trained by the turmoil raging around him of the times, and by his own share in the general contention--according to the self-dedication of his mind trained within the temple--he, stricken with darkness, and amidst the gloom of extinguished earthly hopes, assumed the singing robes of the poet. The purpose of the Paradise Lost is wholly religious. He strikes the loudest, and, at the same time, the sweetest-toned harp of the Muse with the hand of a Christian theologian. He girds up all the highest powers of the human mind to wrestling with the most arduous question with which the human faculties can engage--the all-involving question--How is the world governed? Do we live under chance, or fate, or Providence? Is there a God? And is he holy, loving, wise, and just? He will "Assert eternal providence, And justify the ways of God to man." The justifying answer he reads in the Scriptures. Man fell, tempted from without by another, but by the act of his own free-will, and by his own choice. Thus, according to the theology of Milton, is the divine Rule of the universe completely justified in the sin into which man has fallen--in the punishment which has fallen upon man. The Justice of God is cleared. And his Love? That shines out, when man has perversely fallen, by the Covenant of Mercy, by finding out for him a Redeemer. And thus the two events in the history of mankind, which the Scriptures present as infinitely surpassing all others in importance, which are cardinal to the destinies of the human race, upon which all our woe, and, in the highest sense, all our weal are hung, become the subject of the work--the Fall of man consoled by the promise and undertaking of his Redemption.