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short-wakes in Dante's soul responsive emotions, and finds a calm and sweet expression in his verse.

Take, for example, the poet's ruling conception of heaven. It is that of light-light qualified by love. No language upon earth has such a marvelous wealth of terms expressive of the varying shades and aspects of light as has the Italian. And the most of these it owes to Dante. He not only pressed into service every word his native Italian furnished, but he revived scores of words which slept in the Latin classics; and, when these would not suffice, he coined yet others from the mint of his own brain. This was no fanaticism of sensuous delight; it was the struggle of a great nature to express moral truth through the poor vehicle of human speech. There rang forever in his ears that sounding and sublime sentence: "God is light, and in him is no darkness at all." In the " In the "Paradise," when all other earthly images fail him to describe the state of the redeemed, he represents their blessedness under the figure of ever new intensities and splendors of the light. The saints are "light in the Lord"; they have "awaked, and risen from the dead, and Christ has given them light."

So the "light" is the light of truth, of purity, of holiness the opposite to that "darkness" which is error and impurity and sin. As God himself is light, and dwells in the light which is unapproachable, so each successive rise in the scale of being is a rise from one degree of light to another-not a merely physical and passive elevation either, since it is the mind and heart and will into which and through which "the true light now shineth." No Mohammedan paradise is here, but

only the paradise which consists in holiness and in likeness to God. The poet who could thus resist the sensuous and externalizing influences of the church of his day must not only have drunk deep of a nobler than Pierian spring-even the well of Holy Scripture, but must have been specially guided and enlightened by the Holy Spirit of God.

In another respect Dante's "Paradise" is worthy of the highest praise. It represents nearness to God and serv ice to God's creatures as contemporaneous. Rank in God's creation is determined by the clearness of the soul's vision of God-here the mystical and contemplative element in religion has its rights accorded to it. But the ascetic exaggerations of this truth, which had so infected the life of the church, Dante is almost wholly a stranger to. He writes from the point of view, not of the monk, but of the common Christian. Exceedingly few of the so-called saints of the Roman Catholic calendar does he deign to notice; the more healthful scriptural examples of chastity and faith and endurance are strewn thickly over his pages. And then, most remarkable of all, he has made the nine heavens, with all their upper and lower spheres, only the working-places of the redeemed; while their working-places are below, their dwelling-places are on high, in the mystical White Rose which is above all time and space, around the mystical lake of light, where there is no need of sun or moon because God and the Lamb are the light of it.

All the saints dwell in the light of God's immediate presence, and according to their capacity are made to reflect that light. But just in proportion to the light

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which they are able to receive, just in proportion to their nearness to God and the clearness of their vision of him, is the service they are permitted to render others. At the same time that they worship above, they have an existence and perform a service in the universe of time and space. The highest of them can heaven of the fixed stars;

help God's creatures in the the lowest of them can help those who are just beginning their course in the heaven of the moon. It is not worth our while to stop here and smile at Dante, until we ponder those words of our Lord from which the poet, it may be, derived the suggestion of his thought: "See that ye despise not one of these little ones, for . . . in heaven their angels do always behold the face of my Father which is in heaven." What is this but to say: Heaven and earth are not mutually exclusive. Angels —and if angels, why not redeemed men?-by so much as they are near to God, by so much do they busy themselves in service to God's creatures. Heaven is no refuge of idleness; no hands hang down, and no lips are dumb. "His servants shall serve him." Knowledge of God and service to men are contemporaneous and interdependent. The nearer we get to God the larger will be our sphere of loving activity; the more shall we resemble him, who, though he was the very Son of God and in the very bosom of the Father, yet was among us "as one that serveth."

So holiness is joined to love, and holiness and love together constitute Dante's heaven. It is beautiful to see how, in the "Paradise," all heaven rejoices over the new joy of each victorious and ascending spirit, and how increasing nearness to God brings its inhabitants

ever nearer to each other. Even the ministrants in the upper temple get new understanding of the wonders of God's grace, and take on a new brightness of holy love, as they see Dante enter heaven.

It was with such thoughts as these that the exile. soothed the long years of his poverty and disappointment. Who can wonder that to him the spiritual world became at last more real than the material world that was open to his senses! It is sometimes made cause of complaint against him that his representations were so matter of fact; that his journey through hell, purgatory, and heaven was so real a journey; that its incidents were so like the incidents of actual experience. Ah, this is the wonder and the poetry of it! Imagination and piety created a new world. Just so did John Bunyan, in Bedford jail, turn from the earthly to the heavenly, from the seen to the unseen, from the temporal to the eternal. He not only saw Christian making his way from the City of Destruction to the Heavenly City, but he was Christian.

So Dante's vividness of description is not mere literary art; it is a deeper process than that-it is a living through the things which he described, so that he too could say: Quorum magnaque pars fui. It is this intense realism which gives the "Divine Comedy" its chief power. It is the utterance of the greatest man of his time, and one of the greatest men of all times. It is his conscientious and God-fearing attempt to express the truth of God as his generation apprehended it, and so to express it that it might influence all after ages to turn from error and iniquity to truth and righteousness. Thomas Carlyle has called Dante "the mouth

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155 piece of the Middle Ages." The German Tieck declares that in him "ten silent centuries found a voice." This seems high praise, but Dante deserves higher praise than this. He is the mouthpiece, not only of the Middle Ages, but of all ages. Not twelve centuries, but all the centuries, find a voice in him. He illustrates truths that are true not only then, but now and always-truths of sin and purgation and recovery to righteousness, truths for the expression of which God spread the floor of the universe with its mosaic of constellations, and caused the curtain of night and chaos to rise at the creation.

"The corruption of the will, the purification of the will, the perfection of the will," these are Dante's themes; and, as they are the greatest themes of all, so they are themes the most deeply affecting and permanently inspiring. Like Mary's breaking of the alabaster box, this offering of Dante to Beatrice, wherever the gospel goes, will be spoken of for a memorial of her; but it will be a memorial of something higher still, even of that higher love which spoke through the love of the Triune God to a humanity that was sunk and lost in its sin. For this reason the poem of Dante will never die. Dante's universe has changed. In the midst of the western hemisphere modern discovery has found not the Mount of Purgatory but a vast new continent. Our earth is no longer the center of the solar system-it is a satellite of the sun instead. But the great truths of being remain just what they were in Dante's time; and the "Divine Comedy" will be immortal, because it is the grandest utterance yet given by man to these universal and fundamental principles in the nature of man and the nature of God.