Persuasive intentions and rhetoric strategies in Vieira’s discurso engenhoso tend to corroborate the main options of the new political power born with the Restoration of Portuguese independence in 1640; but what seems obvious in many of his sermons is critically modulated in História do Futuro, Esperanças de Portugal, Quinto Império do Mundo, an heterodox document of his version of the providential destiny of Portugal. Milton, on the other hand, represents in Paradise Lost large masses in movement, the vast cosmic space, the energy of revolt and conflict, and the eminence of religious devotion; his grand design is still, in the context of the English Restoration, a tormented lamentation for the defeat of «the rule of the saints» and a daring attack on the new regime.
    In História do Futuro and Paradise Lost, the texts that will be the focal point of this paper, prophecy and the millenium do not go without political commitment, sense of community and prospective utopian representations. The messianic kingdom of the Portuguese Jesuit and the New Jerusalem of the English Puritan correspond, however, to inimical heterodox visions of the Second Coming, different visionary experiences and approaches to the justification of «the ways of God to men».