Milton's Paradise lost Author:John Milton Purchase of this book includes free trial access to www.million-books.com where you can read more than a million books for free. This is an OCR edition with typos. Excerpt from book: NOTES. 1. first disobedience. Until Adam sinned and disobeyed God man was without sin. 2. that forbidden tree, the tree of the knowledge of good and evil, ... more »the fruit of which Adam and Eve were forbidden to taste. As ' forbid' in the active voice can govern two accusatives, one of the' person, another of the thing, in the passive we may say either that a person is forbidden to do something, or, as here, that something is forbidden. mortal taste, taste producing death. ' Mortal' is used in the same sense in the common phrase ' mortal wound.' See i. 766; ii. 729 ; and note on i. 266. 3. death. The whole human race was made liable to death in order to punish Adam and Eve for their act of disobedience. 4. loss of Eden. Adam and Eve were alao, as a punishment for the same offence, driven out of the beautiful garden of Eden, in which they dwelt before their fall. In this line Eden means the garden of Eden ; in the last line of the poem, and in iv. 210, Eden means the country in which the garden was situated. After Adam and Eve had been expelled from the garden of Eden they were still in the country of Eden. one greater Man, Jesus Christ, who by His death on the cross atoned for the sin of the first man and obtained for the human race restoration to Paradise. Milton does not seem to think that the new Paradise will be identical with the old. See book xii. 463, where he does not decide whether the new blissful seat is to be in heaven or earth. It must be remembered that, though Christ by His life and death secured the eventual restoration of mankind to Paradise, the actual restoration will not be realized until the end of the world, when He will judge the world and receive the righteous into bliss. Therefore the present subjunctive 'restore,' not the imperfect subjunctive,...« less