IN no particular, perhaps, is Christian thought more sadly awry than in its concept of the nature and law of the divine activity in creation, and for this fact one of the world's greatest poets is largely responsible. Milton wrote not only as a poet but as a theologian, and when the profoundly moral earnestness of this great religionist finds expression in the "incomparable phrases," as Matthew Arnold calls them, with which lie pictured the events narrated in the second chapter of Genesis, the sympathetic reader retains not only a vivid remembrance of his majestic measure, but he can hardly escape the impress of an interpretation which is no less material in its sense than splendid in its setting, and the effect has been to fix in thought a sense of God and His order which yet dominates dogmatic theology, but to which the spiritual interpretation of the Bible is and ever has been inherently opposed. Take, for instance, the following:—
Thus God heav'n created, thus the earth,
Matter unform'd and void, darkness profound
Cover'd th' abyss; but on the watery calm
His brooding wings the spirit of God outspread
. . . . . . . . . . .And earth self-balanced on her center hung.
When one reads lines like these he is tempted to pass over if not practically to consent to the strenuous dogma of the Puritan preacher, because of his delight in the compelling song of the princely poet. The day has come, however, when the illogic and anthropomorphism of the Miltonic concept of God and His creation can no longer remain unchallenged. The voice of Spirit is heard in every land, and it speaks for the immanence of that divine Mind which is the immediate source and support of all true being, the only cause and creator.
