It seems likely that Milton himself, before he was fairly caught in the mesh of his own imagination, was well aware that his subject demanded something of the nature of a _tour de force_. He had to give physical, geometric embodiment to a far-reaching scheme of abstract speculation and thought,--parts of it very reluctant to such a treatment. The necessities of the epic form constrained him. When Satan, on the top of Mount Niphates, exclaims-- Which way I fly is Hell; myself am Hell; when Michael promises to Adam, after his expulsion from the garden-- A Paradise within thee; happier far; Milton must have known as well as any of his critics that this conception of Hell and of Paradise, if insisted on, would have shattered the fabric of his poem. His figures of Sin and Death were of his own invention, and we must not suppose him so obtuse as never to have realised the part that his shaping imagination bore in the presentment of other and greater figures in the poem. In some respects he tried rather to impose a scheme of thought and imagination upon his age than to express the ideas that he found current. His theology and his cosmical conceptions are equally tainted with his individual heresies. He flies in the face of the Athanasian Creed by representing the generation of the Son as an event occurring in time--"on such day as Heaven's great year brings forth." His later poem of _Paradise Regained_ and the posthumous treatise of Christian Doctrine show him an Arian; in the poem the Almighty is made to speak of This perfect man, by merit called my Son.