irected their wills. These men
believed in a world beyond the grave as an ever present reality. Hell,
Purgatory, Heaven were so near to them that they, so to speak, could
touch the invisible world with their hands. To them, as to Dante, "this
life was but a shadowy appearance through which the eternal realities of
another world were constantly betraying themselves." Of the intensity
and universality of faith in that life beyond death, Dante is not the
exception but the embodiment. His poem has no such false note of
scepticism as we detect in Tennyson's In Memoriam. Note the words of the
modern poet:

"I falter where I firmly trod
And falling with my weight of cares
Upon the great world's altar stairs
That slope through darkness up to God,
I stretch lame hands of faith and grope
And gather dust and chaff and call
To what I feel is Lord of all
And faintly trust the larger hope."

Not thus does Dante speak. As the voice of his age he begins with faith,
continues with faith and leads us to the unveiled vision of God. He
both shows us his unwavering adherence to Christian doctrine in that
scene in Paradiso where he is examined as to his faith by St. Peter and
he teaches us that the seen is only a stepping stone into the unseen. It
has been said of him in reference to his Divina Commedia, "The light of
faith guides the poet's steps through the hopeless chambers of Hell with
a firmness of conviction that knows no wavering. It bears him through
the sufferings of Purgatory, believing strongly fits reality: it raises
him on the wings of love and contemplation into Heaven's Empyrean, where
he really hopes to enjoy bliss far beyond that whereof he says."
(Brother Azarias.)

Leading the religious awakening of the thirteenth century and making
possible Dante's work at the end of the century were two of the world's
greatest exponents of the spiritual life, both signalized in the
Paradiso. St. Dominic characterized by Dante (Par. XII, 56) as "a
jealous lover of the Christian faith with mildness toward his disciples
but formidable to his foes," founded an order to be "the champions of
Faith and the true lights of the world." Even in its early days it gave
to the world eminent scholars such as Albertus Magnus and St. Thomas
Aquinas, and it has never ceased to number among its members great
thinkers, ardent apostles, stern ascetics and profound mystics. In
Dante's time it was the only order specially charged