Page:Studies of a Biographer 4.djvu/124

 'found many things both worthily done and nobly spoken,' but that when he turned to the history of the Church under a Christian emperor, he was amazed to find it all 'quite contrary'—nothing but ambition, corruption, contention, combustion. The Catholic version of Christianity, at least, is altogether repugnant to him; and Newman couples Milton with Gibbon (not a very similar pair in other respects), 'each breathing hatred to the Catholic Church in his own way; each a proud and rebellious creature of God; each gifted with incomparable gifts.' Dislike to Milton was for that reason one of the 'notes' of the literary representatives of the Oxford 'movement.'

If Milton took for pure Christianity a system into which it is hard to fit the doctrines of corruption or of humility, his heterodoxy was combined with the most absolute faith in the historical revelation. As his theodicy is also to be an epic, he has to make his 'fable' out of the events entwined into the whole system of Protestant theology. The first chapter of Genesis, taken as literally and absolutely true, gives the catastrophe to the accomplishment of which the action of all the characters concerned is exclusively directed. If, therefore, we are to accept the book as a serious