It is Virgil who thus offers himself as Dante's conductor through hell and purgatory; it is Beatrice who has sent him for Dante's deliverance, and who is to be his guide through paradise after Virgil has led him through the two lower provinces of God's empire.

Many have been the interpretations put upon the great poem. The true interpretation is that which finds in it a combination of meanings. Dante himself has told us that there are four separate senses which he intends his story to convey. There are the literal, the allegorical, the moral, and the anagogical. In Psalm 114 I, we have the words, "When Israel went out of Egypt." This, says the poet, may be taken literally, of the actual deliverance of God's ancient people; or allegorically, of the redemption of the world through Christ; or morally, of the rescue of the sinner from the bondage of his sin; or anagogically, of the passage of both soul and body from the lower life of earth to the higher life of heaven. So from Scripture Dante illustrates the method of his poem. We have his own warrant for beginning with the literal meaning, and then superadding the spiritual.

Nothing can be more plain than the personal element that runs through the poem; Dante's own life and spiritual struggles furnish the basis for all the rest. We cannot be far wrong in maintaining that the beginning of the poem describes Dante's own entanglement in the thickets of sense and unbelief, his early efforts to make his way up the mount of knowledge and virtue by strength of his own; the demonstration of his inability to cope with the lust of the flesh, the lust of the eyes, and the pride of life-the three adversaries which like

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wild beasts would drag him down; the offer and the acceptance of superior aid, in order that he may know the truth and the truth may make him free; and then his gradual growth in knowledge and holiness, as one after another the sins and infirmities of the soul are revealed and are put beneath his feet, until at last he rises to communion with God and to the society of the holy. In other words, and yet more briefly, "The Divine Comedy" is an autobiographical "Pilgrim's Progress," written from the point of view of the Middle Ages and the Romish Church.

But this is only the beginning. Around and upon this core and foundation, is built up a wondrous symbolic structure in which Dante has sought to express his ideas of God's relations to humanity. It has been well said that the ancient epic never rose above the individual. "Arms and the man I sing," said Virgil. Dante sings, not of himself, nor of any particular man alone, but of man in the largest sense: "His subject is man, as by merit or demerit, through freedom of the will, he renders himself liable to the reward or punishment of justice." Man, in this large sense, has two sides to his nature, an earthly and a heavenly, a temporal and a spiritual. In each of these relations he needs authority. God has therefore provided upon earth two rulers, the pope to be his vicegerent in spiritual, the emperor to be his vicegerent in temporal things; the former like. the sun giving forth the light of God's truth directly, the latter like the moon reflecting that of the former; each has his sphere, and each, being directly responsible to God, is to a certain extent independent of the other. There is therefore a political sense in which "The Divine

Comedy" must be taken, and the constant interweav ing of political incident and philosophy, which has struck so many as beside the purpose of the poem, is only a sign of its larger completeness and unity.

Miss Rossetti has beautifully traced the working of this idea into the introduction of the poem. The darksome wood is the distracted and hopeless political condition of Italy. The hill of virtue and reason that arose before the mind of Dante, was the scheme of a stable and righteous commonwealth. But there was no material to build a city. The Guelph powers beset him. Factious Florence, proud France, avaricious Rome, are respectively the leopard, the lion, and the wolf, that set themselves against all order and all progress. Dante sinks back almost into despair of his country, when Virgil, the symbol of science and philosophy, appears for his deliverance, and brings him to a right understanding of the divine will, so far as the light of nature can go; and when that has done its utmost, divine grace, in the person of Beatrice, discovers to him the very consummation of God's plans for the temporal good of humanity.

Whatever we may think of the details of this interpretation, there can be no doubt that in Dante's soul there had dawned the idea of a free State, as well as that of a free Church. He was immeasurably grieved and angered at the insane jealousies and enmities that tore his country in pieces. His prose essay, "De Monarchia," shows that his advocacy of Ghibelline doctrine in the latter half of his life, was based upon the conviction. that only the supremacy of the emperor could deliver Italy from the wiles of the papacy and give her a strong

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and solid government. Italian unity and the independence of Church and State both found their first great advocate in Dante-or rather, shall we say, first found germinal expression in his writings. No stronger bond than love for Dante has for centuries, in spite of all her political divisions, preserved a moral unity in Italy. And now at length even Dante's dream of political unity has worked its own realization. The pen has proved mightier than the sword, because it has led men to wield the sword in securing and in defending the unity of Italy.

So far, as to the temporal or political aim of Dante's poem, the settlement of the true principles upon which civil society should be built. This, however, is not its chief aim. The spiritual side of man is more important than this. He would set forth the nature of man as a subject of God, free to obey or to disobey, and bound to answer to his own conscience and to Him who made him. And here we must remember that, with all Dante's reverence for God's spiritual vicegerent upon earth, he never fails to distinguish between the office and him who held it, between the papacy and the individual popes.

He held loyally to Roman Catholic doctrine-indeed there was none other in his day to hold to; but he held to it in no slavish way. He abhorred the temporal power of the papacy; he regarded it as usurpation of the prerogatives of the State, treachery to the spiritual calling of the vicar of God, and cause of all the divisions and miseries of Italy. He has denounced the pride and venality of many a pope, and he has put some of them, heels upward, in hell. We cannot think him lacking in

courage, when we hear him calling the rulers of the church Antichrist:

Your avarice o' erwhelms the world in woe.
To you Saint John referred, O shepherds vile,
When she, who sits on many waters, had
Been seen with kings her person to defile;
(The same, who with seven heads arose on earth
And bore ten horns, to prove that power was hers,
Long as her husband had delight in worth).

Your gods ye make of silver and of gold;

And wherein differ from idolaters,

Save that their god is one, yours manifold?
Ah, Constantine! what evils caused to flow,
Not thy conversion, but those fair domains

Thou on the first rich Father didst bestow !

In Dante's expositions of Scripture he has given us independent judgments; widely read as he was in sacred and patristic learning, we find him ever applying the Bible to matters of common life; as we unconsciously get something of our theology from Milton, many an educated Italian only quotes Dante when he thinks he is quoting the Bible. The whole range and compass of man's spiritual being is the subject of Dante's treatment. He intended nothing less than to set forth the whole process and philosophy of man's fall and man's restoration. Not simply the outward means for the cure of souls, but the great array of spiritual agencies that work for the punishment of the lost and the recovery of the penitent, constitute the subject of his story.

Let us put ourselves again, then, with the poet, in the dreary wood. The poet is only the image of humanity, straying away from God and miserably perishing in its