if they merit had,
'T is not enough, because they had not baptism,
Which is the portal of the Faith thou holdest;
And if they were before Christianity,
In the right manner they adored not God;
And among such as these am I myself.
For such defects, and not for other guilt,
Lost are we, and are only so far punished,
That without hope we live on in desire.'"
(IV, 25.)

(b) Our poet represents a soul as punished but for one sin, though it
may be guilt-dyed by its having broken all the commandments. Even so, it
is placed in one particular circle wherein a certain sin is punished and
we are not told that it passes to other circles. In explanation of this
we have only to remember that Dante, for our instruction, is showing us
object lessons of evil, types of certain sins. Judas, for example, whose
name is synonymous with traitor, is exhibited as suffering in the ninth
circle, the circle of treason, the poet taking no notice of other sins,
v.g., sacrilege, avarice, suicide, of which the fallen apostle may have
been guilty. Furthermore, Dante as a master psychologist and moralist
would teach us the lesson that the evil doer may come to damnation
through one sin if that acquires such an ascendency over his will as to
become a capital sin or predominant passion of his life. Then the
besetting passion is the father of an innumerable progeny of evil. This
is seen (Purg., XX, 103) in the case of Pygmalion, whose predominant
passion, avarice, made him a traitor, a thief and a parricide.

(c) Let us not be surprised that Dante is so lenient in the punishment
of carnal sinners. He assigns a lighter punishment to the unchaste than
to the unjust. Back of his plan is a sound theological doctrine. Guilt
is to be estimated not simply from the gravity of the matter prohibited
to conscience and the knowledge that one has of the evil, but more
especially from the malice displayed by the will in its voluntary
choosing and embracing the evil. Now impurity, it is held, is often a
sin of impulse. It springs from concupiscence, a common human
inclination, wrong only when there is inordinateness. Then though a man
freely consents to the temptation and thereby commits a grievous sin,
his will generally is not overcast with perversion or affected with
malice. That being so, Dante in assigning punishment for sins against
the virtue of purity is moved by the thought that such sins deserve a
milder punishment in Hell, becaus