ABSTRACT
The sacred, puritanical basis of Milton's great epic has gone long unquestioned that readers and critics remain relatively ignorant of many secular resources surveyed in this chapter. Taking up the standard Anglican critique that Calvinists not only fostered devout ignorance and discouraged secular learning but suppressed free conscience, which Arminians like Taylor experienced under Cromwell, Taylor mounted a strong case against predestination. This chapter suggests that the author of Paradise Lost lacks strong scriptural, spiritual, and devotional support, and states goal of justifying God's ways to man additionally requires a secular philosophical, cosmological, and anthropological framework. Paradise Lost never shows exactly what a perfect earthly government would have looked like, it supplies strong hints that Edenic rule would have been as 'mixed' as its geography and civilized pursuits. According to James Turner, they also 'abused Genesis' by indulging in 'excesses of neo-Gnostic myth making' that produced conceptions of marriage as foreign to Milton's civilized Eden as their mystical dream theories.
