JOURNAT. AND PROCEEDINGS. 57 
course of the seasons, the obliquity of the ecliptic, the Pleiades, the 
stars as being suns and centres of planetary systems, the phases of 
Venus, the comets, etc. 
The pages of his poem rival the arch of the firmament in glory 
—gems of literary beauty here, myriads of glowing sapphires there. 
It is a strange coincidence, as a stray piece of contemporary 
history, that while in the year 1665, Milton, driven out of London 
by the plague, was in a country house revising and rewriting his 
“Paradise Lost,” Newton, driven out also by the plague, was in the 
same year, 1665, thinking out the theory of gravitation, aroused to 
enquiry by a well-known trivial occurrence in his garden, and was 
testing his theory of calculating the distance the moon fell to the 
earth in one second of time. Thus, at the same time and in the 
same country, we have the poet philosopher Milton dealing with the 
great problems of creation and eternity, and revealing to his fellow- 
men, by the spell of his immortal song, the counsels of God from 
before the beginning, and also the mathematical philosopher Newton 
dealing also with the great problems of the universe and revealing 
also to his fellowmen in that work of God-given genius, the “ Prin- 
cipia,” those eternal, unchangeable and universal methods of God’s 
government in nature, based as they are on adamantine truth, and 
read by him in the shining scriptures of the sky. 
Before closing something must be said of Milton’s theory of 
creation. His was the Divine Fiat theory—‘‘ Let there be,” and all 
things instantaneously were. It was the spectacular method—the 
traditional theory taken as the author understood it from— 
‘¢ That Shepherd who first taught the chosen seed 
In the beginning how the heavens and earth 
Rose out of Chaos,” 
and it possessed all those elements of majesty that entered into this 
greatest of. all poems, and which most sublimely interpreted a 
.transcendentally sublime theme. Milton died 100 years before 
Kant or LaPlace had suggested the nebular theory of creation, and 
although evolution had been slowly working out her results, no 
Darwin yet had sought to interpret her movements and no Christian 
philosopher had arisen to point out the good gifts that the truly 
wise men of modern time were to lay at the feet of our Christ. 
