VERY EXALTED IDEAS, BUT ERRONEOUS.

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as particularly as if he had been born there, and came down hither on purpose to give us an account of it (I hope he is better informed by this time); but this he does in such a manner, as jostles with religion, and shocks our faith in so many points necessary to be believed, that we must forbear to give up to Milton, or must set aside part of the sacred text, in such a manner, as will assist some people to set it aside all.

I mean by this, his invented scheme of the Son's being declared in heaven to be begotten then, and then to be declared generalissimo of all the armies of heaven; and of the Father's summoning all the angels of the heavenly host to submit to him, and pay him homage. The words are quoted already, page 309.

I must own the invention, indeed, is very fine, the images exceeding magnificent, the thought rich and bright, and, in some respect, truly sublime: but the authorities fail most wretchedly, and the mistiming of it is unsufferably gross, as is noted in the introduction to this work; for Christ is not declared the Son of God but on earth; it is true, it is spoken from heaven, but then it is spoken as perfected on earth; it it was at all to be assigned to heaven, it was from eternity, and there, indeed, his eternal generation is allowed; but to take upon us to say, that, On a day; a certain day! for so our poet assumes, lib. v.:

-When on a day,

-On such day

As heaven's great year brings forth, th' empyreal host
Of angels, by imperial summons called,

Forthwith from all the ends of heaven appear'd.

This is, indeed, too gross; at this meeting he makes God declare the Son to be that day begotten as before; had he made him not begotten that day, but declared general that day, it would be reconcilable with Scripture and with sense; for either the begetting is meant of ordaining to an office, or else the eternal generation falls to the ground; and if it was to the office (mediator), then Mr. Milton is out in ascribing another fixed day to the work; see lib. x. But then the declaring him that day, is wrong chronology too, for Christ is declared the Son of God with power, only by the resurrection of the dead, and this is both a declaration in heaven and in earth; Rom. i. 4. And Milton can have no

authority to tell us there was any declaration of it in heaven before this, except it be that dull authority, called poetic license, which will not pass in so solemn an affair as that.

But the thing was necessary to Milton, who wanted to assign some cause or original of the Devil's rebellion; and so, as I said above, the design is well laid, it only wants two trifles called truth and history; so I leave it to struggle for itself.

This groundplot being laid, he has a fair field for the Devil to play the rebel in, for he immediately brings him in not satisfied with the exaltation of the Son of God. The case must be thus: Satan, being an eminent archangel, and perhaps the highest of all the angelic train, hearing this sovereign declaration, that the Son of God was declared to be head or generalissimo of all the heavenly host, took it ill to see another put into the high station over his head, as the soldiers call it ; he, perhaps, being the senior officer, and disdaining to submit to any but to his former immediate sovereign; in short, he threw up his commission, and, in order not to be compelled to obey, revolted, and broke out in open rebellion.

All this part is a decoration noble and great, nor is there any objection to be made against the invention, because a deduction of probable events; but the plot is wrong laid, as is observed above, because contradicted by the Scripture account, according to which Christ was declared in heaven, not then, but from eternity, and not declared with power but on earth, viz., in his victory over sin and death, by the resurrection from the dead; so that Mr. Milton is not orthodox in this part, but lays an avowed foundation for the corrupt doctrine of Arius, which says, there was a time when Christ was not the Son of God.

But to leave Mr. Milton to his flights, I agree with him in this part, viz., that the wicked or sinning angels with the great archangel at the head of them, revolted from their obedience, even in heaven itself; that Satan began the wicked defection, and being a chief among the heavenly host, consequently carried over a great party with him, who altogether rebelled against God; that upon this rebellion they were sentenced, by the righteous judgment of God, to be expelled the holy habitation; this, besides the authority of Scripture, we have visible testimonies of from the devils themselves; their influences and operations among us every day, of which mankind are witnesses; in all the merry things they do in his

WAR BETWEEN MICHAEL AND SATAN.

341

name, and under his protection, in almost every scene of life they pass through, whether we talk of things done openly or in masquerade, things done in or out of it, things done

in earnest or in jest.

But then, what comes of the long and bloody war that Mr. Milton gives such a full and particular account of, and the terrible battles in heaven between Michael with the royal army of angels on one hand, and Satan with his rebel host on the other; in which he supposes the numbers and strength to be pretty near equal? but at length brings in the Devil's army, upon doubling their rage, and bringing new engines of war into the field, putting Michael and all the faithful army to the worst; and, in a word, defeats them? For though they were not put to a plain flight, in which case he must, at least, have given an account of two or three thousand millions of angels cut in pieces and wounded, yet he allows them to give over the fight, and make a kind of retreat; so making way for the complete victory of the Son of God: now this is all invention, or at least, a borrowed thought from the old poets, and the fight of the giants against Jupiter, so nobly designed by Ovid, almost two thousand years ago; and there it was well enough; but whether poetic fancy should be allowed to fable upon heaven, or no, and upon the king of heaven too, that I leave to the sages.

By this expulsion of the devils, it is allowed by most authors, they are, ipso facto, stripped of the rectitude and holiness of their nature, which was their beauty and perfection; and being ingulphed in the abyss of irrevocable ruin, it is no matter where, from that very time they lost their angelic beautiful form, and commenced ugly frightful monsters and devils, and became evil doers, as well as evil spirits; filled with a horrid malignity and enmity against their Maker, and armed with a hellish resolution to show and exert it on all occasions; retaining however their exalted spirituous nature, and having a vast extensive power of action, all which they can exert in nothing else but doing evil, for they are entirely divested of either power or will to do good; and even in doing evil, they are under restraints and limitations of a superior power, which it is their torment, and, perhaps, a great part of their hell, that they cannot break through.

CHAPTER VI.

WHAT BECAME OF THE DEVIL AND HIS HOST OF FALLEN SPIRITS AFTER THEIR BEING EXPELLED FROM HEAVEN, AND HIS WANDERING CONDITION TILL THE CREATION; WITH SOME MORE OF MR. MILTON'S ABSURDITIES ON THAT SUBJECT.

HAVING thus brought the Devil and his innumerable legions to the edge of the bottomless pit, it remains, before I bring them to action, that some inquiry should be made into the posture of their affairs immediately after their precipitate fall, and into the place of their immediate residence; for this will appear to be very necessary to Satan's history, and indeed, so as that, without it, all the farther account we have to give of him will be inconsistent and imperfect.

And first, I take upon me to lay down some fundamentals, which I believe I shall be able to make out historically, though, perhaps, not so geographically as some have pretended to do.

1. That Satan was not immediately, nor is yet locked down into the abyss of a local hell, such as is supposed by some, and such as he shall be at last; or that,

2. If he was, he has certain liberties allowed him for excursions into the regions of this air, and certain spheres of action, in which he can and does move, to do like a very devil as he is, all the mischief he can, and of which we see so many examples both about us and in us in the inquiry after which, I shall take occasion to examine whether the Devil is not in most of us sometimes, if not in all of us one time or other.

3. That Satan has no particular residence in this globe or earth where we live; that he rambles about among us, and marches over and over our whole country, he and his devils, in camps volant; but that he pitches his grand army or chief encampment in our adjacencies, or frontiers, which the philosophers call atmosphere, and whence he is called the prince of the power of that element or part of the world we call air; from whence he sends out his spies, his agents, and emissaries, to get intelligence, and to carry his commissions to his trusty and well-beloved cousins and councillors on earth, by which his business is done, and his affairs carried on in the world.

TIME OF FALL BETWEEN HEAVEN AND HELL. 343

Here again, I meet Mr. Milton full in my face, who will have it, that the Devil, immediately at his expulsion, rolled down directly into a hell proper and local; nay, he measures the very distance, at least gives the length of the journey by the time they were passing or falling, which, he says, was nine days; a good poetical flight, but neither founded on Scripture or philosophy, for he might every jot as well have brought hell up to the walls of heaven, advanced to receive them, or he ought to have considered the space which is to be allowed to any locality, let him take what part of infinite distance between heaven and a created hell he pleases.

But let that be as Mr. Milton's extraordinary genius pleases to place it; the passage, it seems, is just nine days betwixt heaven and hell; well might Dives then see father Abraham, and talk to him too; but then the great gulph which Abraham tells him was fixed between them, does not seem to be so large as, according to Sir Isaac Newton, Dr. Halley, Mr. Whiston, and the rest of our men of science, we take it to be.

But suppose the passage to be nine days, according to Mr. Milton, what followed? why hell gaped wide, opened its frightful mouth and received them all at once; millions and thousands of millions as they were, it received them all at a gulp, as we call it; they had no difficulty to go in, no, none at all.

Facilis descensus Averni sed revocare gradum

Hoc opus hic labor est.

Virg.

All this, as poetical, we may receive, but not at all as historical; for then come troubles insuperable in our way, some of which may be as follow: (1.) hell is here supposed to be a place; nay, a place created for the punishment of angels and men, and likewise created long before those had fallen, or these had being; this makes me say, Mr. Milton was a good poet, but a bad historian; Tophet was prepared of old, indeed, but it was for the king, that is to say, it was prepared for those whose lot it should be to come there; but this does not at all suppose it was prepared before it was resolved whether there should be subjects for it, or no; else we must suppose both men and angels were made by the glorious and upright Maker of all things on purpose for destruction, which would be incongruous and absurd.