Blake's feelings towards Milton had always been divided. He saw in him the highest order of poetic genius, but also, ominously present, the spirit of reason (Urizen) enthroned in the wrong place, and a servile love of the classics that placed him under the heel of the Daughters of Memory. To change the metaphor, Milton's Pegasus was ridden by Urizen. Blake's final criticism of Swedenborg was that he drew the line in the wrong place between heaven and hell; and his amendment was to take his two contraries and marry them. From that time forward his first question in trying a man's religion was, Where do you draw the line? Popular religion always draws it in the wrong place. Good things are reckoned evil and evil things good. But as Blake continued to put his question to the world's great spirits, he counted twenty-seven different answers that had produced twenty-seven different churches, each church having its own particular heaven and corresponding hell. He had hoped to unite all these contraries as successfully as he had Swedenborg's; but when he came to Christ's division, finding that nothing would unite His sheep and goats, and His wheat and tares, he henceforth took Christ's dividing line as absolute, and the line of any other as right only when it coincided with Christ's. Applying this test to Milton, Blake saw that he wrongly divided heaven and hell, and that this fatal mistake necessarily affected the characters of his Messiah and Satan. Messiah, who should have stood for the supreme poetic genius, was the embodiment of restrictive reason, and Satan, who by immemorial tradition is absolute evil, was endowed with a marvellous imagination that inevitably brought with it certain virtues. When Blake inquired for the root cause of this perversion in Milton, he traced it to the fact that Reason had largely usurped the place of Imagination. He then took one more customary step. He set Milton in his imagination in the light of the eternal order. Seen in this perspective, the prime fact about him appeared that he had fallen in his encounter with Urizen and come under his dominion, and the last was that his redemption would be effected only by going down into self-annihilation and death with Christ, and then rising again with the life of pure imagination. Once imagination (Los) is supreme, then reason (Urizen) falls into his proper place, and the return into the eternal order is accomplished.