Those despotic governments which are founded on the passions of men, and
principally upon the passion of fear, keep their chief as much as may
be from the public eye. The policy has been the same in many cases
of religion. Almost all the heathen temples were dark. Even in the
barbarous temples of the Americans at this day, they keep their idol
in a dark part of the hut which is consecrated to his worship. For this
purpose too the Druids performed all their ceremonies in the bosom of
the darkest woods, and in the shade of the oldest and most spreading
oaks. No person seems better to have understood the secret of
heightening, or of setting terrible things, if I may use the expression,
in their strongest light, by the force of a judicious obscurity, than
Milton.