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If him by force he can destroy, or worse, By some false guile pervert; and shall pervert; For man will hearken to his glozing lies, And easily transgress the sole command, Sole pledge of his obedience: so will fall He and his faithless progeny: whose fault? Whose but his own? Ingrate, he had of me All he could have; I made him just and right, Sufficient to have stood, though free to fall. Meaning- In this Book, Milton transitions from Hell to Heaven, and the contrast couldn't be clearer. God wields effortless authority over his angel followers, the setting is filled with light and music, and everything is also a little bit less interesting. Here, the angels ask God what will happen when the devils try to corrupt mankind. To everyone's surprise, God says that Satan will succeed: he will tempt Adam and Eve to disobey God. The big question here is, why isn't God himself responsible for mankind's fall? If God is all-powerful and created the human race, and foresaw their fall, then isn't he liable for the corruption of his own creations? God responds that he created mankind with the gift of free will: mankind is "sufficient to have stood yet free to fall." Therefore, God isn't directly responsible for humans' decisions--he allows them to be free of all control, including his own. Why does God endow mankind with free will? One could argue that he does so because free will allows human beings to achieve more and please God further. It's true that free will can be dangerous, since devils can tempt human beings into sin. And yet it's only through free will that humans can truly embrace God--they choose to do so, rather than being forced to. This passage also brings up the important idea of predestination--if God can foresee what will happen, and states it now (and God is never wrong), then do Adam and Eve really have free will? Many of Milton's contemporaries, the Calvinists, believed wholly in predestination--that God has already chosen who goes to Hell and who goes to Heaven, and all human action is just the playing out of that predetermined plan. Milton doesn't buy this idea, however, as he emphasizes with the "free to fall" statement. God's foreknowledge can then be explained with the idea of time. In many versions of Christianity, God exists outsideof time, and so he can see what will happen in the future, but it's not the future to him--all times exist at once in the scheme of divine eternity. Thus within their own concept of time, Adam and Eve have free will, but to God it's as if they've alreadychosen to sin.