Such a representation, if it diminishes the grandeur of the universe accessible to sense, exalts that of the supersensual and extramundane regions where the action takes its birth, and where Milton's gigantic imagination is most perfectly at home.
There is no such compromise between religious creeds in Milton's mind as he saw good to make between Ptolemy and Copernicus.

The matter was, in his estimation, far too serious.

Never was there a more unaccountable misstatement than Ruskin's, that "Paradise Lost" is a poem in which every artifice of invention is consciously employed--not a single fact being conceived as tenable by any living faith.

Milton undoubtedly believed most fully in the actual existence of all his chief personages, natural and supernatural, and was sure that, however he might have indulged his imagination in the invention of incidents, he had represented character with the fidelity of a conscientious historian.
His religious views, moreover, are such as he could never have thought it right to publish if he had not been intimately convinced of their truth.

He has strayed far from the creed of Puritanism.