al manifestations
of the unseen world. A typical answer is given to that appeal by a
distinguished writer, Doctor Inge, Dean of St. Paul's, London, who
declares: "If this kind of after-life were true, this portrayed in the
pitiable revival of necromancy in which many desolate hearts have sought
spurious satisfaction, it would, indeed, be a melancholy postponement or
negation of all we hope and believe about our dead."

Prescinding from any attempt to discuss the occult phenomena evoked,
observed and studied in our day or to treat of the matters involved in
the supernatural in the books of the day, one may state as a fact that
the whole tendency of present day literature is to show a yearning for
light on a subject of fundamental importance to human nature. Far back
in the history of the race Job gave voice to the spiritual problems that
are today engaging the attention of the world. Some fifteen hundred
years ago, St. Augustine proposed to himself the question which so
generally concerns the twentieth century: "On what matter of all those
things of which thou art ignorant, hast thou the greatest desire for
enlightenment?" The great Bishop of Hippo becomes the spokesman of
humanity when he answers his own question by proposing another: "Am I
immortal or not?" (Soliloquia 2d).

In the realms of literature no work of man has answered that question
with greater vividness of imagery, intensity of concentration, beauty of
description--all based in a large measure on the teachings of
Christianity--than has Dante in his Divine Comedy. Devised as a love
offering to the memory of his beloved Beatrice who in the work is
symbolized as Heavenly Light on the things hidden from man, the poem
leads the reader through the dark abyss of Hell, the patient abode of
Purgatory, the glorious realm of Heaven as if the poet had seen Eternity
in reality instead of in imagination. Not only the state and the
conditions of the soul after death does he visualize with the precision
of Euclid, but as a philosopher and a theologian he proposes for our
instruction in the course of the journey many questions of dogmatic and
speculative thought affecting the Hereafter. He believes himself called
to be not simply a poet to entertain his readers, but a prophet and a
preacher with burning fire to deliver a message for man's salvation. So
he asks the help of Heaven:

"O Supreme Light that so high upliftest Thyself from mortal conceptions,
re-lend a little