Sit unpolluted, and the ethereal mold, 145 To be no more. Sad cure! for who would lose, Though full of pain, this intellectual being, Those thoughts that wander through eternity, To perish rather, swallowed up and lost In the wide womb of uncreated night, 150 Devoid of sense and motion? And who knows, Let this be good, whether our angry foe Of darkness do we dread? How oft amidst Thick clouds and dark doth heaven's allruling Sire Choose to reside, his glory unobscured, 265 And with the majesty of darkness round Covers his throne; from whence deep thunders roar, Mustering their rage, and heaven resembles hell! As he our darkness, cannot we his light 269 Imitate when we please? This desert soil Wants not her hidden luster, gems and gold; Nor want we skill or art, from whence to raise Magnificence; and what can heaven show more? Our torments also may in length of time Become our elements; these piercing fires As soft as now severe, our temper changed Into their temper; which must needs re Which when Beelzebub perceived, than In doing what we most in suffering feel? 299 whom, Satan except, none higher sat, with grave Aspect he rose, and in his rising seemed A pillar of state; deep on his front engraven Deliberation sat, and public care; And princely counsel in his face yet shone, Drew audience and attention still as night Or summer's noontide air, while thus he spake: 'Thrones and imperial powers, offspring of heaven, 310 Nor will occasion want, nor shall we need With dangerous expedition to invade Heaven, whose high walls fear no assault or siege, Or ambush from the deep. What if we find Some easier enterprise? There is a place To be created like to us, though less That shook heaven's whole circumference confirmed. Thither let us bend all our thoughts, to learn What creatures there inhabit, of what mold Or substance, how endued, and what their 356 And where their weakness, how attempted best, power, By force or subtlety. Though heaven be shut, And heaven's high Arbitrator sit secure Some advantageous act may be achieved The puny habitants; or, if not drive, Abolish his own works. This would sur And, so refused, might in opinion stand Dreaded not more the adventure than his voice Forbidding; and at once with him they rose. 477 With awful reverence prone; and as a god Extol him equal to the Highest in heaven. Nor failed they to express how much they 480 praised That for the general safety he despised His own for neither do the spirits damned Lose all their virtue; lest bad men should boast Their specious deeds on earth, which glory excites 484 Or close ambition varnished o'er with zeal. Thus they their doubtful consultations dark Ended, rejoicing in their matchless chief. As when from mountain-tops the dusky clouds Ascending, while the north wind sleeps, o'erspread Heaven's cheerful face, the louring element Scowls o'er the darkened landscape snow or shower; 491 If chance the radiant sun, with farewell sweet, Extend his evening beam, the fields revive, The birds their notes renew, and bleating herds 494 Attest their joy, that hill and valley rings. 500 Yet live in hatred, enmity, and strife Among themselves, and levy cruel wars, Wasting the earth, each other to destroy: As if (which might induce us to accord) Man had not hellish foes enough besides, That day and night for his destruction wait. and whereof ye are the governors: a nation not slow and dull, but of a quick, ingenious, and piercing spirit, acute to invent, subtle and sinewy to discourse, not beneath the reach of any point the highest that human capacity can soar to. Therefore the studies of learning in her deepest sciences have been so ancient and so eminent among us, that writers of good antiquity and ablest judgment have been persuaded that even the school of Pythagoras and the Persian wisdom took beginning from the old philosophy of this island. And that wise and civil Roman, Julius Agricola, who governed once here for Cæsar, preferred the natural wits of Britain, before the labored studies of the French. Nor is it for nothing that the grave and frugal Transylvanian sends out yearly from as far as the mountainous borders of Russia, and beyond the Hercynian wilderness, not their youth, but their staid men, to learn our language, and our theologic arts. Yet that which is above all this, the favor and the love of Heaven we have great argument to think in a peculiar manner propitious and propending towards us. Why else was this nation chosen before any other, that out of her as out of Sion should be proclaimed and sounded forth the first tidings and trumpet of Reformation to all Europe? And had it not been the obstinate perverseness of our prelates against the divine and admirable spirit of Wyclif, to suppress him as a schismatic and innovator, perhaps neither the Bohemian Huss and Jerome, no, nor the name of Luther, or of Calvin had been ever known: the glory of reforming all our neighbors. had been completely ours. But now, as our obdurate clergy have with violence demeaned the matter, we are become hitherto the latest and the backwardest scholars, of whom God offered to have made us the teachers. Now once again by all concurrence of signs, and by the general instinct of holy and devout men, as they daily and solemnly express their thoughts, God is decreeing to begin some new and great period in his church, even to the reforming of Reformation itself: what does he then but reveal himself to his servants, and as his manner is, first to his Englishmen; I say as his manner is, first to us, though we mark not the method of his counsels, and are un |