marriage.

"A perfect life and merit high in Heaven
A lady o'er us," said she, "by whose rule
Down in your world they vest and veil themselves,
That until death they may both watch and sleep
Beside that Spouse who every vow accepts
Which charity conformeth to his pleasure.
To follow her, in girlhood from the world
I fled, and in her habit shut myself,
And pledged me to the pathway of her sect.
Then men accustomed unto evil more
Than unto good, from the sweet cloister tore me;
God knows what afterward my life became."
(III, 97.)

Certain questions interesting to a seeker of truth grow out of
Piccarda's statement and these Beatrice proceeds to solve for the
edification of Dante. The first question asks whether in the assignment
to the lowest sphere of souls who violated their vows, there is divine
Justice; the second concerns Plato's teaching that souls really come
from the stars and return thither; the third is about the loss of merit
through coercion of the will, as exemplified in the case of Piccarda.
The solution of these difficulties need not detain us if only we
remember Dante's view that "the theories maintained by him in the Heaven
of the Moon are intended to manifest," as Gardner and Scartazzini point
out, "the moral freedom of man and to show that no external thing can
interfere with the soul that is bent upon attaining the end for which
God has destined it."

To the next Heaven, the sphere of Mercury, Beatrice and Dante soar more
swiftly than an arrow attains its mark while the bow is still vibrating.
Increasing in loveliness as she ascends, Beatrice, in the second realm,
radiates such splendor that Mercury itself, apart from its own light,
gains such glory from her that it seems to glitter or smile from very
gladness.

"My lady there so joyful I beheld
As unto the brightness of that heaven she entered
More luminous thereat the planet grew,
And if the star itself was changed and smiled
What became I who by my nature am
Exceeding mutable in every guise?" (V, 97.)

Greeting the travellers, more than a thousand spirits joyfully exclaim:
"Lo, one who shall increase our loves!" The Saints in Mercury thus
testify to their delight that one (Dante) has come to be the fresh
object of their love, just as it is said that "there shall be joy before
the angels of God upon one sinner doing penance." (Luke XV, 10.) These
splendors in Mercury are the souls of those in w