to the teaching of the seers and poets of all ages; it translates into medieval language the classical imagery, and spiritualises for modern thought the world of

sense.

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"The poetry of Dante," writes Shelley, may be considered as a bridge, thrown over the stream of time, which unites the modern and the ancient world. Homer was the first, and Dante the second epic poet. Dante was the first awakener of entranced Europe; he created a language in itself musical and persuasive, out of a chaos of inharmonious barbarisms. He was the congregator of those great spirits who presided over the resurrection of learning; the Lucifer of that starry flock, which in the thirteenth century shone forth from republican Italy as from a heaven, into the darkness of the benighted world."

Coleridge has drawn the contrast between the Greek and Christian ideals, with which Browning in "Old Pictures in Florence" has made us familiar.

"Dante is the living link between religion and philosophy. He philosophised the religion and christianised the philosophy of Italy. The Greeks changed ideas into finites, and these finites into anthropomorphs. Their religion, their poetry, their very pictures, became statuesque. With them the form was the end. The reverse of this is found in Christianity; finites, even the human form, must be brought into connection with, and be symbolical of, the infinite, and hence arose a combination of poetry (1) with doctrine and (2) with sentiment."

No one can be considered really educated in the literature of the world who has not in some degree made a study of Dante, and yet there is in it much that is only for an age, not for all time, and to follow up the many bye-paths would divert us from the main current of the teaching. We introduce but little which has to do with the historical Dante, but we behold in vision "the passage of the blessed soul from the slavery of this present corruption to the liberty of eternal glory". We earnestly hope that the teaching of this wonderful poem may help our members in their earthly pilgrim

age, and that they may be enabled in some measure to see in the visible universe, the scroll, that is written within and without, the picture writing, the sacred hieroglyphics which reveal the unseen.

Much of the scenery of the poem is incapable of representation, except in the chambers of imagery in which the soul dwells alone, for even pictures, much more dramatic representations, tend to materialise the spiritual; but there is a region in which the religious consciousness loves to dwell, a universe, in which pure form takes actual shape; into this region we are led by the artist and the poet; it is to this region that the master of Greek tragedy introduced us in the Prometheus, and Wagner has to-day shown that poetry, music, and dramatic action, help to make more real and present and energetic the convictions of our souls.

When the symbolism is too awful to represent to eye or ear, we pause, and leave it to the heart to conceive the things which God revealed to this great prophet during the years of his wanderings in the desert-this Moses sent to bring the people of God from the bondage of the letter into the liberty of the spirit.

The poem has exercised a strange fascination for great thinkers and writers of the most opposite opinions, and many have been the translations and commentaries published in recent times; the interest is increasing rather than diminishing.

I begin with a few quotations from the eloquent essay of Dean Church:

"The Divina Commedia is one of the landmarks of history. More than a magnificent poem, more than the beginning of a language and the opening of a national literature, more than the inspirer of art, and the glory of a great people, it is one of those rare and solemn monuments of the mind's power. It stands with the Iliad and Shakespeare's plays, with the writings of Aristotle and Plato, with the Novum

Organum and the Principia, with Justinian's Code, with the Parthenon and St. Peter's. It is the first Christian Poem; and it opens European Literature, as the Iliad did that of Greece and Rome." "The greatness of his work is not in its details. It is the greatness of a comprehensive and vast conception, sustaining without failure the trial of its long and hazardous execution, and fulfilling at its close the hope and promise of its beginning. Many a surprise, many a difficulty, many a disappointment, many a strange reverse and alternation of feelings, attend the progress of the most patient and admiring reader of the Commedia,—as many as attend on one who follows the unfolding of a strong character in life. We are often shocked when we are prepared to admire-repelled when we came with sympathy; depths are revealed which we cannot sound, mysteries which baffle and confound us."

"Those who know the Divina Commedia best, will best know how hard it is to be the interpreter of such a mind as Dante's, but they know and would wish others also to know, not by hearsay, but by experience, the power of his wonderful poem. They know its austere, yet subduing beauty; they know what force there is in its earnest and solemn verse to strengthen, to tranquillise, to console . . . they know how often its seriousness has put to shame their trifling, its magnanimity their faintheartedness, its living energy their indolence, its stern and sad grandeur rebuked low thoughts, its thrilling tenderness overcome sullenness and assuaged distress, its strong faith quelled despair and soothed perplexity, its vast grasp imparted the sense of harmony to the view of clashing truths. They know how often they have found in times of trouble, if not light, at least that deep sense of reality, permanent though unseen, which is more than light can always give-in the view which it has suggested to them of the judgments and the love of God."

"The primary purpose is to stamp a deep impression on the mind of the issues of good and evil doing here—of the real worlds of pain and joy. To do this forcibly, it is done in detail, of course it can only be done in figure. Punishment, purification, or the fulness of consolation are, as he would think, at this very moment, the lot of all the numberless spirits who have ever lived here-spirits still living and sentient as himself; without pause or interval, in all its parts simultaneously, this awful scene is going on. The judgments of God are being fulfilled, could we see it. It exists, as might be seen, at each instant of time, by a soul whose eyes were opened. And this he imagines. It had been imagined before; it is the working out which is peculiar to Dante. It is not a barren vision. His

subject is besides the eternal world, the soul which contemplates it; by sight, according to his figures-in reality, by faith. As he is led on from woe to deeper woe, then through the tempered chastisements and resignation of Purgatory to the beatific vision, he is tracing the course of the soul on the earth, in realising sin and weaning itself from it, telling of its purification and preparation for its high lot, by converse with the good and wise, by the remedies of grace, by efforts of will and love, perhaps by the dominant guidance of some single pure and holy influence, whether of person, or institution, or thought. Nor will we say that beyond this earthly probation, he is not also striving to grasp and imagine to himself something of that awful process and training by which, whether in or out of the flesh, the spirit is made fit to meet its Maker, its Judge, and its Chief Good."

"It is an epos of the soul, placed for its trial in a fearful and wonderful world, with relations to time and matter, history and nature, good and evil, the beautiful, the intelligible, and the mysterious, sin and grace, the infinite and the eternal-and having in the company and under the influences of other intelligences, to make its choice, to struggle, to succeed or fail, to gain the light or be lost-this was a new and unattempted theme."

It is not then as the revelation of a future state that we shall treat the poem, this is doubtless embraced in it; it is the objective presentation of the subjective consciousness.

"The poem is a diary of a human soul in its journey upwards from error, through repentance to atonement with God."1

As the vibrations of ether which move the organs of sense need to be translated by the understanding, ere we see ocean and land and sky, and the manifold of this visible, intelligible universe-so does the Reason, the spiritual consciousness, find in the things of earth the patterns of things in the heavens, and the eternal realities can be expressed for us only in the language of poetry and symbol of parable and metaphor. Not only in what are commonly called poems, but in the language of common life, we find what have been

1 Lowell.

called fossil poems. We talk of deep sorrow, lofty

ambition, broad-mindedness, longsuffering, outer darkness, for though a spirit cannot be thought of as having dimensions, we who live in the cave can know the realities beyond and above only through the shadows that we see.

A little child and one who has never grown up may read this poem as a literal story, but to those who have spiritual discernment, there is ever as they read a double consciousness. Perhaps Bunyan's Pilgrim's Progress, which is I hope familiar to all, will best illustrate my meaning, though Milton's Paradise Lost has greater resemblance to Dante's poem. When Bunyan describes his "progress from this world to that which is to come," the scenery is that of Elstow, his actual home on earth. We have the village in the plain, the field leading to a bog which stands for the slough of Despond, the people are doubtless his neighbours, yet the progress described is that of his own soul, and all things are seen by him from the vantage ground of the eternal world. It does not occur to us to think whether Bunyan believed that any part of the story was literally true.

So too we read Dante's spiritual history in the Vita Nuova, the Convito, the Commedia. The familiar landscape of Italy, the terraced slopes of the Alps, are transfigured to form the scenery of that stage on which is enacted the spiritual drama; the people are those who once dwelt on earth, but for the theatre on which is enacted the soul's tragedy, we have that globe,

"That hollow space

That rounds the mortal temples of a man ".1

Dante's visions were larger, deeper, higher perhaps

1 Richard II.