but from his own life that he learned the meaning of the world as he saw it around him. If it were true in the world of his day as he saw it, that as the result of political and ecclesiastical statesmanship the wounded were massacred on the battlefield, women and children were put to the sword, and existence allowed to the weak only at the price of their submission to enduring injustice, then the question God must answer to justify his own existence to such a mind as that of Dante was the meaning of all this! And the answer given at the very gate of hell was "omnipotent power, eternal justice, and primal love" confining evil within itself, so that while those who love evil create for themselves an everlasting Inferno of infinite horrors, those who love good pass through it on their way to the purifying experience which will fit them for heaven. Dante did not postpone hell as a punishment for the infamies of the oppression he saw on earth to some dim future. He saw through the fair outside of the cowls of hypocrisy to the leaden linings, as those who love evil while they pretend to worship good walk wearily between the lake of pitch on one side of them and the serpent-infested wilderness on the other. So long as they love evil and inflict it on others, it shall reward them with eternal tortures. That is the law of love which protects the meek, as Dante discovered it. Wherever evil existed on earth he saw hell as eternal as the love of evil which created it.

It is a hell in which no lover of good can remain, as no lover of evil can depart from it. It is eternal and it results inevitably from the "primal love" through the omnipotent power of which all shall suffer in themselves the evil they inflict on others. And as the love of evil on earth means hell on earth to endure into eternity, so the love of good means purtfication on earth for heaven, beginning on earth in love and enduring everlastingly in the beatific vision of creative power, raising every redeemed soul from strength to strength through an eternity of always-increasing efficiency.

If this can be properly called "theology," it is a theology of suf fering rather than of reason. Dante writes as a man who has lived through sympathy the universal life of the race. It is not intellect

a divine enthusi

he expresses in his poems, but something higherasm of sympathetic anguish which moved him as the Hebrew prophets were moved by the sight of the people they loved passing their children "through the fire to Moloch." He believed in Divine inspiration for all lovers of goodness, and in the fourth treatise of "The Banquet" he declares that Fabricius, Regulus, Cincinnatus,-the great heathen patriots of the classical age were divinely inspired. Certainly," he says, "it must be evident remembering the lives of these men and of the other divine citizens that such wonders (as they did) could not have been without some light of Divine good

ness added to their own goodness of nature. And it must be evident that these most excellent men were instruments with which Divine Providence worked." In the same way Dante regarded himself, Aristotle, Virgil, and all others who love goodness, as inspired by heaven. This is his theology—that all goodness is of heaven and all evil of hell. His politics as he defines himself in "The Banquet" are equally simple. Neither power, nor money, nor long descent, nor any other thing which was claimed in his time as a title to superiority can give it. It comes only from the love of virtue and from virtuous actions:

"The noble man does noble deeds —
Who does a churl's act is a churl.»

In Dante's prose his intellect defines thus in explicit terms what in his verse his imagination projects in thronging images of terror or of beauty. His poetry is the least limited by intellect-the most highly spiritual ever written in any European language. There is more of the intellect, of the "wit" which shows itself in axiom and epigram in Pope's "Essay on Man," than in all the poetry Dante ever wrote. But Pope was a wit" and Dante was a prophet. Pope could be satisfied with the world of the commonplace. To him "the proper study of mankind is man." To Dante knowledge of God is the only end of man's existence. He lived sick, passionate, and sad, suffering the evil not only of his own nature, but of the whole evil world around him. Yet seeing things "bare to the buff," having no illusions and waiting in the world as one cured of a long insanity waits his discharge from the hospital, he still saw the darkness around him "shot through with glory and fire," and in the lives of the commonplace men and women around him, living steadfastly and courageously the life of duty, he recognized the heaven to which he looked for the reward of all suffering. a heaven of limitless power for the weak, of limitless wisdom for the ignorant, of eternal creativeness for all who will consent to build up rather than to pull down.

That an idea so sublime as this could find adequate expression in any language or from any lips is not to be expected. There is much that is grotesque and repulsive, much that is incoherent, much that is unintelligible in the "Divine Comedy," but there is always in it an almost superhuman melody of language as a vehicle for the aspiration of a soul which, having attained its heaven, was perpetually disquieted there by the necessity of proclaiming the truth and by the fear of proving "but a timid friend" to it. W. V. B.

OF RICHES AND THEIR DANGEROUS INCREASE

[Dante's principal prose work, the "Convito," or "Banquet," is a collection of essays, connected by a slender thread of argument and interspersed with poems which they interpret. They illustrate a philosophy depending largely on that of Aristotle, but they are dominated by Dante's individuality and they do much to interpret it clearly to students of his poems.]

A

S HAS been said, it is possible to see the imperfection of riches not only in their indiscriminate advent, but also in their dangerous increase; and that in this we may perceive their defect more clearly, the text makes mention of it, saying of those riches, "However great the heap may be it brings no peace, but care "; they create more thirst and render increase more defective and insufficient. And here it is requisite to know that defective things may fail in such a way that on the surface they appear complete, but, under pretext of perfection, the shortcoming is concealed. But they may have those defects so entirely revealed that the imperfection is seen openly on the surface. And those things which do not reveal their defects in the first place are the most dangerous, since very often it is not possible to be on guard against them; even as we see in the traitor who, before our face, shows himself friendly, so that he causes us to have faith in him, and, under pretext of friendship, hides the defect of his hostility. And in this way riches, in their increase, are dangerously imperfect, for, submitting to our eyes this that they promise, they bring just the contrary. The treacherous gains always promise that, if collected up to a certain amount, they will make the collector full of every satisfaction; and with this promise they lead the Human Will into the vice of Avarice. And, for this reason, Boethius calls them, in his book of "Consolations," dangerous, saying, "Oh, alas! who was that first man who dug up the precious stones that wished to hide themselves, and who dug out the loads of gold once covered by the hills, dangerous treasures?"

The treacherous ones promise, if we will but look, to remove every want, to quench all thirst, to bring satisfaction and sufficiency; and this they do to every man in the beginning, confirming promise to a certain point in their increase, and then, as soon as their pile rises, in place of contentment and refreshment they bring on an intolerable fever-thirst; and beyond sufficiency,

they extend their limit, create a desire to amass more, and, with this, fear and anxiety far in excess of the new gain.

Then, truly, they bring no peace, but more care, more trouble, than a man had in the first place when he was without them. And therefore Tullius says, in that book on "Paradoxes," when execrating riches: "I at no time firmly believed the money of those men, or magnificent mansions, or riches, or lordships, or voluptuous joys, with which especially they are shackled, to be amongst things good or desirable, since I saw certain men in abundance of them especially desire those wherein they abounded; because at no time is the thirst of cupidity quenched; not only are they tormented by the desire for the increase of those things which they possess, but also they have torment in the fear of losing them." And all these are the words of Tullius, and even thus they stand in that book which has been mentioned.

And, as a stronger witness to this imperfection, hear Boethius, speaking in his book of "Consolations": "If the Goddess of Riches were to expand and multiply riches till they were as numerous as the sands thrown up by the sea when tost by the tempest, or countless as the stars that shine, still Man would weep."

And because still further testimony is needful to reduce this to a proof, note how much Solomon and his father David exclaim against them,-how much against them is Seneca, especially when writing to Lucilius,-how much Horace,-how much Juvenal, — and, briefly, how much every writer, every poet, and how much Divine Scripture. All Truthful cries aloud against these false enticers to sin, full of all defect. Call to mind also, in aid of faith, what your own eyes have seen, what is the life of those men who follow after riches, how far they live securely when they have piled them up, what their contentment is, how peacefully they rest.

What else daily endangers and destroys cities, countries, individual persons, so much as the fresh heaping up of wealth in the possession of some man? His accumulation wakens new desires, to the fulfillment of which it is not possible to attain without injury to some one.

And what else does the Law, both Canonical and Civil, intend to rectify except cupidity or avarice, which grows with such heaps of riches, and which the Law seeks to resist or prevent? Truly, the Canonical and the Civil Law make it sufficiently clear, if the first sections of their written word are read. How evident it is,

nay, I say it is most evident, that these riches are, in their increase, entirely imperfect; when, being amassed, naught else but imperfection can possibly spring forth from them. And this is what the text says.

But here arises a doubtful question, which is not to be passed over without being put and answered. Some calumniator of the Truth might be able to say that if by increasing desire in their acquisition, riches are imperfect and therefore vile, for this reason science or knowledge is imperfect and vile, in the acquisition of which the desire steadily increases; wherefore Seneca says, "If I should have one foot in the grave, I should still wish to learn."

But it is not true that knowledge is vile through imperfection. By distinction of the consequences, increase of desire is not in knowledge the cause of vileness. That it is perfect is evident, for the Philosopher, in the sixth book of the "Ethics," says that science or knowledge is the perfect reason of certain things. To this question one has to reply briefly; but in the first place it is to be seen whether in the acquisition of Knowledge the desire for it is enlarged in the way suggested by the question, and whether the argument be rational. Wherefore I say that not only in the acquisition of knowledge and riches, but in each and every acquisition, human desire expands, although in different ways; and the reason is this: that the supreme desire of each thing bestowed by Nature in the first place is to return to its first source. And since God is the First Cause of our Souls, and the Maker of them after His Own Image, as it is written, "Let us make Man in Our Image, after Our likeness," the Soul especially desires to return to that First Cause. As a pilgrim who goes along a path where he never journeyed before, may believe every house that he sees in the distance to be his inn, and not finding it to be so may direct his belief to the next, and so travel on from house to house until he reach the inn, even so our Soul, as soon as it enters the untrodden path of this life, directs its eyes to its supreme good, the sum of its day's travel to good; and therefore whatever thing it sees which seems to have in itself some goodness, it thinks to be the supreme good. And because its knowledge at first is imperfect, owing to want of experience and want of instruction, good things that are but little appear great to it; and therefore in the first place it begins to desire those. So we see little children desire above all things an apple; and