to the mountain to strip off the slough
That lets not God be manifest to you."
(II, 117.)

At the foot of the mountain the poets meet a troop of spirits who,
though excommunicated, died contrite. For their delay in submitting to
the Church for absolution they must wait thirty times as long as the
period of their excommunication. One of them, King Manfred, Chief of the
Ghibellines, son of Emperor Frederick II, tells of his last moment
conversion and also how the Bishop of Cosenza at the word of Pope
Clement IV, enforcing the penalty of excommunication against the corpse
of the king, had it removed from the Papal realm and thrown into the
river Verde.

In narrating how a Christian may be saved even if he died under the ban
of the Church, Dante is only expressing what every Catholic knows as to
the effect of excommunication. This ecclesiastical censure incurred by a
contumacious member of the Church, a censure entailing forfeiture of all
rights and privileges common to a Christian, such as the right to the
sacraments,--a right restored through the confessor, however, whenever
there is danger of death--the right to public service and prayers, the
right to jurisdiction, and to benefices, the right to the canonical
forum, to social intercourse and to Christian burial, this censure of
excommunication does not in the mind of the Church carry with it
exclusion from Purgatory or Heaven.

According to a principle of canon law applied to censures, _Ecclesia de
internis non judicat_, the Church in the matter of crime does not
concern itself with interior dispositions, excommunication far from
being a sentence of damnation in the next world, is a penalty pertaining
to the external forum of the Church in this life. Even if the penalty
follows the corpse so far as to exclude it from Christian burial, even
here the purpose of the Church is not to pronounce a verdict of the loss
of the contumacious soul in the Hereafter, but to stigmatize among the
living, the memory of the person and so to inspire in them a hatred of
the evil condemned and a respect for law. The story of Manfred now
follows:

"And one of them began: 'Whoe'er thou art,
Thus going turn thine eyes, consider well
If e'er thou saw me in the other world'
I turned me tow'rds him, and looked at him closely;
Blond was he, beautiful, and of noble aspect,
But one of his eyebrows had a blow divided.
When with humility I had disclaimed
E'er having