It was a living system of thought, and one which carried the
mind upwards towards the Eternal will, rather than downwards towards
my personal security. Keble has said of the old Catholic views,
founded on sacramental symbolism, that they are more poetical than
any other religious conception. But it must be acknowledged that a
predestinarian scheme, leading the cogitation upward to dwell upon
"the heavenly things before the foundation of the world," opens a
vista of contemplation and poetical framework, with which none other
in the whole cycle of human thought can compare. Not election
and reprobation as set out in the petty chicanery of Calvin's
_Institutes_, but the prescience of absolute wisdom revolving all the
possibilities of time, space, and matter. Poetry has been defined as
"the suggestion by the image of noble grounds for noble emotions,"
and, in this respect, none of the world-epics--there are at most
five or six such in existence--can compete with _Paradise Lost_.
The melancholy pathos of Lucretius indeed pierces the heart with a
two-edged sword more keen than Milton's, but the compass of Lucretius'
horizon is much less, being limited to this earth and its inhabitants.
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