his time, while one is strikingly prophetic of his own defence of the execution of Charles I. "The contention between the father of Zimri and Eleazar whether he ought to have slain his son without law; next the ambassadors of the Moabites expostulating about Cosbi, a stranger and a noblewoman, slain by Phineas. It may be argued about reformation and punishment illegal, and, as it were, by tumult. After all arguments driven home, then the word of the Lord may be brought, acquitting and approving Phineas." It was his earnest aim at all events to compose something "doctrinal and exemplary to a nation." "Whatsoever," he says in 1641, "whatsoever in religion is holy and sublime, in virtue amiable or grave, whatsoever hath passion or admiration in all the changes of that which is called fortune from without, or the wily subtleties and refluxes of man's thoughts from within--all these things with a solid and treatable smoothness to paint out and describe; teaching over the whole book of sanctity and virtue, through all the instances of example, with much delight, to those especially of soft and delicious temper who will not so much as look upon Truth herself unless they see her elegantly drest, that, whereas the paths of honesty and good life appear more rugged and difficult, though they be indeed easy and pleasant, they would then appear to all men easy and pleasant though they were rugged and difficult in deed." An easier task than that of "justifying the ways of God to man" by the cosmogony and anthropology of "Paradise Lost."