zealous of the main design, and as finite beings not admitted into
the secrets of government, the last resorts of Providence, or
capable of discovering the final purposes of God (who can work good
out of evil as He pleases, and irresistibly sways all manner of
events on earth, directing them finally for the best to His creation
in general, and to the ultimate end of His own glory in particular),
they must of necessity be sometimes ignorant of the means conducing
to those ends, in which alone they can jar and oppose each other--
one angel, as we may suppose (the Prince of Persia, as he is
called), judging that it would be more for God's honour and the
benefit of His people that the Median and Persian monarchy, which
delivered them from the Babylonish captivity, should still be
uppermost; and the patron of the Grecians, to whom the will of God
might be more particularly revealed, contending on the other side
for the rise of Alexander and his successors, who were appointed to
punish the backsliding Jews, and thereby to put them in mind of
their offences, that they might repent and become more virtuous and
more observant of the law revealed. But how far these controversies
and appearing enmities of those glorious creatures may be carried;
how these oppositions may be best managed, and by what means
conducted, is not my business to show or determine: these things
must be left to the invention and judgment of the poet, if any of so
happy a genius be now living, or any future age can produce a man
who, being conversant in the philosophy of Plato as it is now
accommodated to Christian use (for, as Virgil gives us to understand
by his example, that is the only proper, of all others, for an epic
poem), who to his natural endowments of a large invention, a ripe
judgment, and a strong memory, has joined the knowledge of the
liberal arts and sciences (and particularly moral philosophy, the
mathematics, geography, and history), and with all these