endowed with an enlightened
conscience. Here are uttered the last words of Virgil to Dante, the
explorer of the spiritual country:

"Expect no more or word or sign from me. Free, upright, and
sane is thine own free will, and it would be wrong not to act
according to its pleasure; wherefore thee over thyself I crown
and mitre."[44:5]

But moral self-reliance is not the last word. As Beatrice, the image of
tenderness and holiness, comes to Dante in the earthly paradise, and
leads him from the summit of purgatory into the heaven of heavens, and
even to the eternal light; so there is added to the mere human,
intellectual, and moral resources of the soul, the sustaining power of
the divine grace, the illuminating power of divine truth, and the
transforming power of divine love. Through the aid of this higher
wisdom, the journey of life becomes the way to God. Thus the allegorical
truth of the "Divina Commedia" is not merely an analysis of the moral
nature of man, but the revelation of a universal spiritual order,
manifesting itself in the moral evolution of the individual, and above
all in his ultimate community with the eternal goodness.

"Thou shouldst not, if I deem aright, wonder more at thy
ascent, than at a stream if from a high mountain it descends
to the base. A marvel it would be in thee, if, deprived of
hindrance, thou hadst sat below, even as quiet by living fire
in earth would be."[45:6]

Such, in brief, is Dante's world-view, so suggestive of the freer
idealistic conceptions of later thought as to justify a recent
characterization of him as one who, "accepting without a shadow of a
doubt or hesitation all the constitutive ideas of mediaeval thought and
life, grasped them so firmly and gave them such luminous expression that
the spirit in them broke away from the form."[46:7]

But it must be added, as in the case of Wordsworth, that Dante is a
philosopher-poet not because St. Thomas Aquinas appears and speaks with
authority in the Thirteenth Canto of the "Paradiso," nor even because a
philosophical doctrine can be consistently formulated from his writings,
but because his consciousness of life is informed with a sense of its
universal bearings. There is a famous passage in the Twenty-second Canto
of the "Paradiso," in which Dante describes himself as looking down upon
the earth from the starry heaven.

"'Thou art so near the ultimate salvation,' began Beat