THE HELL OF MALICE 131 Barterers and peculators are plunged into a lake of boiling pitch. Hypocrites wear cloaks and hoods which are gilt outside, but are lined within with lead, whose heavy Thieves are per- weight they try with groans to carry. secuted with a swarm of serpents. are tormented in wrappings of flame that fit them as a garment. Slanderers and schismatics have their limbs miserably mangled. Alchemists and forgers are visited with an itching leprosy. Last of all comes the well of the primeval giants, the mythical demigods who rose against Jove in arms. They are representatives of the last and deepest intensity of sin, the malice that becomes ingratitude, and that betrays kindred and friends, king and country, and finally its very God and Saviour. Treachery is in Dante's scheme the utmost malignity of sin, its most complete and dreadful expression. The lowest pit is called the Judecca, because it holds Judas, who betrayed his Lord. And here Judas is tormented by Satan, to whom for thirty pieces of silver he sold himself. Let us gaze at We have reached hell's lowest point. Satan there. He is a creature of monstrous sizeDante gives us the means of estimating very accurately his dimensions. The primeval giants are each seventy feet tall; Satan is twelve times as great-eight hundred and forty feet therefore in height. At the very center of the earth he sits forever flapping his vast and batlike wings in effort to escape, while these very movements chill the air and turn everything about him to frost and ice. He tries to escape, but every effort only freezes him more solidly into his place of imprisonment. He has three heads and three faces, red, white, and black, to correspond with the three divisions of the human race which he has succeeded in leading to perdition; in each one of his three mouths he is craunching and devouring a traitor, and of the three traitors Judas is chief. The center of hell is not fire but ice-fit type of the hardness and coldness of the heart that is past feeling. The sin of sense has become the sin of malice, and malice has deepened into treachery and positive hatred to God. Feeling led the way in transgression, but the intellect followed, and then the will gave in its conscious adhesion to wrong, until there came the spurning of the very mercy that would save, and the sin against the Holy Ghost that hath never forgiveness, either in this world or in that which is to come. Before we leave the "Inferno," it is important to note three things. The first is that the grotesqueness and monstrosity of Dante's punishments are intended to teach a moral lesson-this namely, that sin is something essentially vile and contemptible. "The Divine Comedy" gives a very different picture of Satan, for example, from that with which we have become familiar in the "Paradise Lost." Milton's Satan is "the archangel ruined," but the emphasis seems rather to lie upon the "archangel" than upon the "ruined"; Satan has been called, indeed, the hero of the "Paradise Lost." But Dante is resolved that no illusive glamour shall surround the great enemy. He will picture him in all his native cruelty and hatred and malignity, a creature loathsome and loathed. Milton, it is true, has passages in which the adversary confesses to an inward torment. Those three LESSONS OF THE INFERNO 133 words, "Myself am hell," contain the very essence of the doctrine of future punishment. But as we see Satan striding over the burning marl, asserting himself in rebellious pride, daring the Almighty to crush him with his thunderbolts, we are forced to admire the unconquerable will that had rather rule in hell than serve in heaven. And in all this Milton is false to Scripture. Though Dante goes beyond the Bible in his grotesque physical images, he expresses more of the spirit of the Bible than does Milton. Sin and sinners he holds in derision. Even in the story of "Francesca da Rimini" we do not lose sight of the serpent that lies beneath the flowers; guilty love has in it moral corruption and eternal despair. All Dante's demons are hateful; no man through him shall be seduced into calling darkness light or evil good. He declares that, just as surely as the righteous shall rise to everlasting life, the wicked shall rise to shame and everlasting contempt. A second lesson which Dante teaches us is that sin is the self-perversion of the will. If there is any thought fundamental to his system it is the thought of freedom. Man is not a waif swept irresistibly downward on the current; he is a being endowed with power to resist, and therefore guilty if he yields. Sin is not misfortune, or disease, or natural necessity; it is willfulness, and crime, and self-destruction. "The Divine Comedy" is, beyond all other poems, the poem of conscience, and this it could not be if it did not recognize man as a free agent, the responsible cause of his own evil acts and his own evil state. He puts Dante is a lover of God and of holiness. himself on God's side in the great moral controversy of the ages. He explains suffering by guilt; he sees the whole race under the load of just penalty; hell is to him only the sign of God's estimate of sin. Is there anything that our age needs more than this strengthening of conscience, this assertion of the claims of righteousness, this declaration that the soul that sinneth, it shall die? Would that our soft and easy-going time, soothed almost to sleep as it is by the tempter's voice, "Thou shalt not surely die," and inclined to compound with Almighty justice for indulgence in all sorts of pleasurable wickedness, would that our age might listen to the awful voices of self-accusation and despair that sound out from Dante's hell to proclaim the voluntariness and the damnableness of sin! Still another lesson from the "Inferno" is that penalty is not in its essence external to the sinner. Here I know I shall contradict the impressions of many of my readers. "Dante not a believer in material and physical punishment?" Ah, I did not say that. I said that to Dante the material and the physical were not the essence of punishment. I most earnestly believe that, with all the material imagery of Dante's hell, he never meant us to take one of these physical punishments merely in its literal sense. He believed indeed in a body, and believed that God would destroy both soul and body in hell; doubtless he expected that sins. of the flesh would be punished in the flesh. But his view of sin as having its source and center in the soul forbade him to put upon the mere body the main stress of penalty. People have made the same mistake about Jonathan Edwards. Because he speaks of the sinner as shrivel. LESSONS OF THE INFERNO 135 ing like a worm in the fire of God's judgments, some have supposed that he regarded hell as consisting mainly of such physical torments. But this is a misinterpretation of Edwards. As he did not fancy heaven to consist in streets of gold or pearly gates, but rather in the holiness and communion with Christ of which these are symbols, so he did not regard hell as consisting in fire and brimstone, but rather in the unholiness and separation from God of which fire and brimstone are symbols. He used the material imagery, because he thought that this best answered to the methods of Scripture. He probably went beyond the simplicity of the Scripture statements, and did not sufficiently explain the spiritual meaning of the symbols he used; but I am persuaded that he neither understood them literally himself, nor meant them to be so understood by others. What is true of Edwards is true of Dante. In how many ways does he show that sin is essentially a condition of soul, an alienation of the heart from God, an inner conflict and agony! It is shown by the fact that living men are represented as already in hell; as eternal life is already present in the souls of the good, so eternal death is already in the souls of the evil. It is shown by the fact that the sinner is made to punish himself; the wicked is holden in the cords of his own sins; sin is its own detecter and judge and tormentor. Dante's doctrine is ever this: "The responsible agent, man, does to himself whatever he does, and his deeds return to the doer." The material symbols are nothing more than symbols-symbols of the corruption and death which are involved in sin itself-symbols of the fact that sin tends to permanence; that sin at last is stamped upon |