soul's past unworthiness, and touch it
with a remorse deeper than all the horrors of hell could awaken. The
anguish purifies, and wins the boon of a Lethe in which the past wrong is
absolutely forgotten. Then comes the full fruition, and the mated souls
traverse a Paradise which still is dearest to Dante as he watches its
reflection in the eyes of Beatrice.

Yet, what does Dante show as the actuality of the world after thirteen
centuries of Christianity? He shows evil existing in its worst forms and
in wide extent. The horrors of the Inferno are the retribution which
seemed to Dante appropriate for the crimes going on about him. The sin
whose punishment he depicts is not a figment of the theologians, an
imaginary participation in Adam's trespass, or the mere human shadows
against a dazzling ideal of purity. In the men of his own time and in
his own community he saw flagrant wrong of every sort,--lust, cruelty,
treachery. The physical hell he imagines in another world is the
counterpart of the moral hell he sees about him in this world. In his
Inferno, Hate and Horror hold high carnival. Much of it is to the modern
reader like a frightful nightmare of the imagination.

In the progress of the centuries, along with the growth of ethical and
spiritual ideals has been the movement of coarser forces--often seeming
to destroy the ethical, yet giving power for the upward movement.

In the reconstruction of European society, the first power was that of
military force. Out of this grew feudalism,--a kind of order, with its
own code of duties; and chivalry, with an atmosphere of noble sentiment
running into fantasy.

Next came the powers of wealth and of knowledge. Wealth grew first by
the association of craftsmen,--the guilds, the free cities.

Then commerce spread, as in the trade of Italy and the Low Countries with
the East.

A succession of discoveries and inventions in the physical world advanced
society.

Gunpowder helped to overthrow feudalism.

Printing made the Reformation possible.

The Copernican theory had its practical result in the stimulation of
discovery and commerce; its intellectual issue in the weakening of the
church's cosmogony, and a discredit of the church's claim to real
knowledge.

The growing wealth of the middle class gave freedom to England,--the
merchants and cities were the strength of the Puritan and Parliamentary
party.

A series of inventions has within the last century