 Support the Monkey! Tell All your Friends and Teachers |
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Support the Monkey! Tell All your Friends and Teachers |
| Table of Contents LINES 585-714. A CHANGED WORLD Here we are, Sin says to her son Death, what do you think of this empire? Isn't this better than sitting at the gate of Hell? Death replies that there don't seem to be many pickings for him. Just wait a bit till I've worked on man, Sin says, and you'll have plenty. Meanwhile, work on everything else that lives-plants, animals, fish, birds. From this dialog we gather that Death came to everything in the World, not just man, when Adam fell. In Heaven, God watches the advance of Sin and Death and remarks to the Son and the angels that he has permitted them to enter the world so that they can act as a kind of sanitation system. At Christ's second coming the mouth of Hell and all its filthy contents will be sealed up, and Heaven and Earth will be renewed. But not until then.
God assigns angels to jobs which will make the world look the way we know it now. These angels bring about summer and winter, arrange the planets to bring about bad influences; push the earth several degrees off a vertical axis; alter the sun's path so that all parts of the earth have seasonal changes, and cause the North, South, East and West winds to bring the extremes of weather which make life difficult. Death begins to affect the animals as Sin's daughter Discord does her work. Milton is describing the postlapsarian world-the world after the Fall, or "lapse." The contrast with the prelapsarian world makes you feel the enormity of Adam's disobedience.
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