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 blame in this matter than he deserves. Divine tyranny with hell as its sanction was no invention of his. The Catholic Church, as all her art shows, had always made full use of it. And the new horror of his own day, the Calvinist predestination, he expressly and frequently repudiates. The free will of man is the very base of his system. In it men may suffer, as it seems to us, out of all proportion to their guilt; but at least they suffer only for deeds done of their own free will. But the true answer to the charge of corrupting English religious thought so often brought against Milton is that while the harm he did must be admitted it was far outweighed by the good. It could not be for nothing that generations of readers, as they turned over Milton's pages, found themselves listening to the voice of a man to whom God's presence was the most constant of realities, the most active of daily and hourly influences: who, from his youth up, visibly glowed with an ardent desire for the service of God and man: who, whatever his faults were, had nothing {147} base or mean about him, habitually thought of life as a thing to be lived on the heights, and by his exalted spirit and unconquerable will enlarges for those who know him the whole conception of what a human being may achieve. It could not be for nothing that on the topmost heights of English poetry stood a man who could scarcely finish a single one of his poems without some soaring ascent to heaven and heavenly things: whose most characteristic utterances for himself are such lines as