“Just are the ways of God
And justifiable to men;”
We note the assured volume of confidence, untroubled by the coming scientific avalanche. The actual date of the publication of the Paradise Lost lies just beyond the epoch to which it belongs. It is the swansong of a passing world of untroubled certitude.
A comparison between Pope’s Essay on Man and the Paradise Lost exhibits the change of tone in English thought in the fifty or sixty years which separate the age of Milton from the age of Pope. Milton addresses his poem to God, Pope’s poem is addressed to Lord Bolingbroke,
“Awake, my St. John! leave all meaner things
To low ambition and the pride of kings.
Let us (since life can little more supply
Than just to look about us and to die)
Expatiate free o’er all this scene of man;
A mighty maze! but not without a plan;”