One change, too, of vast
importance was announced by the words "The Kingdom of Heaven is within
you." This transferred the very scene of conflict, the theatre of
spiritual warfare, from an external to an internal world, and the social
significance of such individual battle lay in its being typical of all
men's lives. The Faerie Queene, the most spiritual poem in all ways in
English, is an epic in essence, though its action is developed by a
revolution of the phases of the soul in succession to the eye, and not
by the progress of one main course of events. The conflict of the higher
and the lower under Divine guidance in the implicit sense is there
shown; the significance is for mankind, though not for a society in its
worldly fortunes; but there is little attempt to externalize the
heavenly power in specific action in superhuman forms, though in mortal
ways the good knights, and especially Arthur, shadow it forth. The
celestial plot is humanized, and the poem becomes a hero-epic in almost
an exclusive way; though the knight's achievement is also an achievement
of God's will, the interest lies in the Divine power conceived as man's
moral victory.
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