Then _did I consider these things, and they all were made through Me
alone, and through none other: by Me also they shall be ended, and
by none other."_

It is all very beautiful: but (for aught that appears) no one was
denying it. It has been shrewdly objected against the arguments of the
"affable Archangel" in the later books of _Paradise Lost_ that argument
by its nature admits of being answered: and the fatal fallacy of putting
human speech into a divine mouth, as in the above passage, is that it
invites retort.

A sensible man does not aspire to bind the sweet influences of Pleiades:
but he may, and does, aspire to understand something of the universal
harmony in which he and they bear a part, if only that he may render it
a more perfect obedience. "Let me know," he craves, "that I may accept
my fate intelligently, even though it prove that under the iron rule of
Necessity I have no more freedom of will than the dead,

_Roll'd round in earth's diurnal course
With rocks, and stones, and trees._"

The claim (as Man must think) is a just one--for why was he given
intelligence if not to use it? And even though disallowed as
presumptuous, it is an instinctive one. Man is, after all, a part of the
Universe, and just as surely as the Pleiades or Arcturus: and moreover
he _feels_ in himself a harmony correspondent with the greater harmony
of his quest. His heart beats to a rhythm: his blood pulses through
steady circuits; like the plants by which he is fed, he comes to birth,
grows, begets his kind, dies, and returns to earth; like the tides, his