then you are to reckon the year to be complete. But be assured that the twentieth part of such a year is not yet elapsed.

If, therefore, you hope to return to this place, toward which all the aspirations of great and good men are tending, what must be the value of that human fame that endures for but a little part of a single year? If, then, you would fain direct your regards on high, and aspire to this mansion and eternal abode, you neither will devote yourself to the rumors of the vulgar, nor will you rest your hopes and your interest on human rewards. Virtue herself ought to attract you by her own charms to true glory; what others may talk of you, for talk they will, let themselves consider. But all such talk is confined to the narrow limits of those regions which you see. None respecting any man was everlasting. It is both extinguished by the death of the individual, and perishes altogether in the oblivion of posterity."

Which, when he had said, I replied, "Truly, O Africanus, since the path to heaven lies open to those who have deserved well of their country, though from my childhood I have ever trod in your and my father's footsteps without disgracing your glory, yet now, with so noble a prize set before me, I shall strive with much more diligence."

"Do so strive," replied he, "and do not consider yourself, but your body, to be mortal. For you are not the being which this corporeal figure evinces;

but the mind of every man is the man, and not that form which may be delineated with a finger. Know therefore that you are a divine person. Since it is divinity that has consciousness, sensation, memory, and foresight,

that governs, regulates, and moves that body over which it has been appointed, just as the Supreme Deity rules this world; and in like manner as an eternal God guides this world, which in some respect is perishable, so an eternal spirit animates your frail body.

"For that which is ever moving is eternal; now that which communicates to another object a motion which it received elsewhere, must necessarily cease to live as soon as its motion is at

an end. Thus the being which is self-motive is the only being that is eternal, because it never is abandoned by its own properties, neither is this self-motion ever at an end; nay, this is the fountain, this is the beginning of motion to all things that are thus subjects of motion. Now there can be on commencement of what is aboriginal, for all things proceed from a beginning; therefore a beginning can rise from no other cause, for if it proceeded from another cause it would not be aboriginal, which, if it have no commencement, certainly never has an end; for the primeval principle, if extinct, can neither be reproduced from any other source, nor produce anything else from itself, because it is necessary that all things should spring from some original source."

Throughout the Middle Ages the world after death continued to reveal more and more fully its awful secrets. Hell, Purgatory, Heaven became more distinct, if it may be so said, more visible. Their site, their topography, their torments, their trials, their enjoyments, became more conceivable, almost more palpable to sense: till Dante summed up the whole of this traditional lore, or at least, with a Poet's intuitive sagacity, seized on all which was most imposing, effective, real, and condensed it in his three co-ordinate poems. That Hell had a local existence, that immaterial spirits suffered bodily and material torments, none, or scarcely one hardy speculative mind, presumed to doubt. Hell had admitted, according to legend, more than one visitant from this upper world, who returned to relate his fearful journey to wondering man: St. Farcy, St. Vettin, a layman Bernilo. But all these early descents interest us only as they may be supposed or appear to have been faint types of the great Italian Poet. Dante is the one authorized topographer of the mediaval Hell. His originality is no more called in question by these mere signs and manifestations of the popular belief, than by the existence and reality of those objects or scenes in external nature which he describes with such

unrivalled truth. In Dante meet unreconciled (who thought of or cared for their reconciliation?) those strange contradictions, immaterial souls subject to material torments: spirits which had put off the mortal body, cognizable by the corporeal sense. The mediaval Hell had gathered from all ages, all lands, all races, its imagery, its denizens, its site, its access, its commingling horrors; from the old Jewish traditions, perhaps from the regions beyond the sphere of the Old Testament; from the Pagan poets, with their black rivers, their Cerberus, their boatman and his crazy vessel; perhaps from the Teutonic Hela, through some of the earlier visions. Then came the great Poet, and reduced all this wild chaos to a kind of order, moulded it up with the cosmical notions of the times, and made it, as it were, one with the prevalent mundane system. Above all, he brought it to the very borders of our world; he made the life beyond the grave one with our present life; he mingled in close and intimate relation the present and the future. Hell, Purgatory, Heaven, were but an immediate expansion and extension of the present world. the present world. And this is among the wonderful causes of Dante's power, the realizing the unreal by the admixture of the real: even as in his imagery the actual, homely, every-day language

or similitude mingles with and heightens the fantastic, the vague, the transmundane. What effect had Hell produced, if peopled by ancient, almost immemorial objects of human detestation, Nimrod or Iscariot, or Julian or Mohammed? It was when Popes all but living, Kings but now on their thrones, Guelfs who had hardly ceased to walk the streets of Florence, Ghibellines almost yet in exile, revealed their awful doom, this it was which, as it expressed the passions and the fears of mankind of an instant, immediate, actual, bodily, comprehensible place of torment; so, wherever it was read, it deepened that notion, and made it more distinct and natural. This was the Hell, conterminous to the earth, but separate, as it were, by a gulf passed by almost instantaneous transition, of which the Priesthood held the keys. These keys the audacious. Poet had wrenched from their hands, and dared to turn on many of themselves, speaking even against Popes the sentence of condemnation. Of that which Hell, Purgatory, Heaven, were in popular opinion during the Middle Ages, Dante was but the full, deep, concentred expression; what he embodied in verse, all men believed, feared, hoped.

Purgatory had now its intermediate place between Heaven and Hell, as unquestioned, as undisturbed by doubt; its existence was as much an article of uncontested popular belief as Heaven or Hell. It were as unjust and unphilosophical to attribute all the legen

dary lore which realized Purgatory to the sordid invention of the Churchman or the Monk, as it would be unhistorical to deny the use which was made of this superstition to exact tribute from the fears or the fondness of mankind. But the abuse grew out of the belief; the belief was not slowly, subtly, deliberately instilled into the mind for the sake of the abuse. Purgatory, possible with St. Augustine, probably with Gregory the Great, grew up, I am persuaded, (its growth is singularly indistinct and untraceable,) out of the mercy and modesty of the Priesthood. To the eternity of Hell torments there is and ever must be notwithstanding the peremptory decrees of dogmatic theology and the reverential dread in so many religious minds of tampering with what seems the language of the New Testament -a tacit repugnance. But when the doom of every man rested on the lips of the Priest, on his absolution or refusal of absolution, that Priest might well tremble with some natural awe-awe not confessed to himself at dismissing the soul to an irrevocable, unrepealable, unchangeable destiny. He would not be averse to pronounce a more mitigated, a reversible sentence. The keys of Heaven and of Hell were a fearful trust, a terrible responsibility; the key of Purgatory might be used with far less presumption, with less trembling confidence. Then came naturally, as it might seem, the strengthening and exaltation of the efficacy of prayer, of the efficacy of the religious ceremo

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nials, of the efficacy of the sacrifice of the altar, and the efficacy of the intercession of the Saints: and these all within the province, within the power, of the Sacerdotal Order. Their authority, their influence, their intervention, closed not with the grave. The departed soul was still to a certain degree dependent upon the Priest. They had yet a mission, it might be of mercy; they had still some power of saving the soul after it had departed. from the body. Their faithful love, their inexhaustible interest, might yet rescue the sinner; for he had not reached those gates over which alone was written, "There is no Hope" That the gates of Hell. which was a mercy, a consolation, became a trade, an inexhaustible source of wealth. Praying souls out of Purgatory by masses said on their behalf, became an ordinary office, an office which deserved, which could demand, which did demand, the most prodigal remuneration. It was later that the Indulgence, originally the remission of so much penance, of so many days, weeks, months, years, or of that which was the commutation for penance, so much almsgiving or munificence to churches or Churchmen, in sound at least extended (and mankind, the high and low vulgar of mankind, are governed by sound) its significance: it was literally understood as the remission of so many years, sometimes centuries, of Purgatory.

If there were living men to whom it had been vouchsafed to visit and

to return and to reveal the secrets of remote and terrible Hell, there were those too who were admitted in vision, or in actual life to more accessible Purgatory, and brought back intelligence of its real local existence, and of the state of souls within its penitential circles. There is a legend of St. Paul himself; of the French monk St. Farcy; of Drithelm, related by Bede; of the Emperor Charles the Fat, by William of Malmesbury. Matthew Paris relates two or three journeys of the Monk of Evesham, of Thurkill, an Essex peasant, very wild and fantastic. The Purgatory of St. Patrick, the Purgatory of Owen Miles, the vision of Alberic of Monte Casino, were among the most popular and wide-spread legends of the ages preceding Dante; and as in Hell, so in Purgatory, Dante sums up in his noble verses the whole theory, the whole popular belief as to this intermediate sphere.

If Hell and Purgatory thus dimly divulged their gloomy mysteries, if they had been visited by those who returned to actual life, Heaven was unapproached, unapproachable. Το be wrapt to the higher Heaven remained the privilege of the Apostle; the popular conception was content to rest in modest ignorance. Though the Saints might descend on beneficent missions to the world of man; of the site of their beatitude, of the state of the Blessed, of the joys of the supernal world, they brought but vague and indefinite tidings. In truth, the notion

of Heaven was inextricably mingled up with the astronomical and cosmogonical as well as with the theological notions of the age. Dante's Paradise blends the Ptolemaic system with the nine angelic circles of the Pseudo Dionysius; the material heavens in their nine circles; above and beyond them, in the invisible heavens, the nine Hierarchies; and yet higher than the highest heavens the dwelling of the Ineffable Trinity. The Beatific Vision, whether immediate or to await the Last Day, had been eluded rather than determined, till the rash and presumptuous theology of Pope John XXII. compelled a declaration from the Church. But yet this ascent to the Heaven of Heavens would seem from Dante, the best interpreter of the dominant conceptions, to have been an especial privilege, if it may be so said, of the most Blessed of the Blessed, the Saint of Saints. There is a manifest gradation in Beatitude and Sanctity. According to the universal cosmical theory, the Earth, the round and level. earth, was the centre of the whole system. It was usually supposed to be encircled by the vast, circumambient, endless ocean; but beyond that ocean (with a dim reminiscence, it should seem, of the Elysian Fields of the poets) was placed a Paradise, where the souls of men hereafter to be blest awaited the final resurrection. Dante takes the other theory he peoples the nine material heavens that is, the cycle of the Moon, Venus, Mercury, the Sun, Mars, Jupiter, Saturn, the fixed stars,

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and the firmament above, or the Primum Mobile - - with those who are admitted to a progressively advancing state of glory and blessedness. this, it should seem, is below the ascending circles of the Celestial Hierarchies, that immediate vestibule or fore-court of the Holy of Holies, the Heaven of Heavens, into which the most perfect of the Saints are admitted. They are commingled with, yet unabsorbed by, the Redeemer, in mystic union; yet the mysticism still reverently endeavors to maintain some distinction in regard to this Light, which, as it has descended upon earth, is drawn up again to the highest Heavens, and has a kind of communion with the yet Incommunicable Deity. That in all the Paradise of Dante there should be a dazzling sameness, a mystic indistinctness, an inseparable blending of the real and the unreal, is not wonderful, if we consider the nature of the subject, and the still more incoherent and incongruous popular conceptions which he had to represent and to harmonize. It is more wonderful that, with these few elements, Light, Music, and Mysticism, he should, by his singular talent of embodying the purely abstract and metaphysical thought in the liveliest imagery, represent such things with the most objective truth, yet without disturbing their fine spiritualism. The subtilest scholasticism is not more subtile than Dante. It is perhaps a bold assertion, but what is there on these transcendent subjects in the vast theology of Aquinas, of which the essence