er to chapter, panting and
uninstructed. And if we belong to the bookless majority who have no time
to read, we rush to the moving picture theatre to get our mental
pabulum--often a season's best seller--boiled down, served in
rapid-fire order and bolted in the twinkling of an eye. For all such
Dante's Paradiso is an intellectual as well as a spiritual impossibility
and the poet begs such not to follow him on his voyage to the eternal
kingdom.

"Oh ye who in some pretty little boat
Eager to listen, have been following
Behind my ship, that singing sails along,
Turn back to look again upon your shores;
In losing me, you might yourselves be lost.
The sea I sail has never yet been passed.
Minerva breathes, and pilots me Apollo,
And Muses nine point out to me the Bears.
Ye other few, who have the neck uplifted
Betimes to th' bread of Angels upon which
One liveth here and grows not sated by it,
Well may you launch upon the deep salt-sea
Your vessel, keeping still my wake before you
Upon the water that grows smooth again.
Those glorious ones who unto Colchos passed
Were not so wonder-struck as you shall be,
When Jason they beheld a ploughman made."
(II, 1.)

The song which Dante sings in the Paradiso is the eternal happiness of
man in vision, love and enjoyment united to his Creator. In preparation
for this final consummation the poet, as he ascends to the Empyrean,
gives a most beautiful epitome of the principal mysteries of religion
and of some of the tenets of scholastic philosophy, treating especially
the Fall of Man, Predestination, Free Will, the Redemption, the
Immortality of the Soul and the theory of Human Knowledge. Allegorically
considered, the poem is a veil, under which we see the ideal life of man
upon earth, exercising virtue and gaining virtue's rewards.

To exhibit man's supreme, happiness in the next life, the Christian
poet, insisting that his purpose is the inculcation of truth, both to
save and to adorn the soul, must base his theme upon the doctrines of
the Church. The definition of some of those dogmas Dante anticipated.
All may be summed up in the following statement:

"It is of Catholic faith that the souls of the blessed see God directly
and face to face and this vision is Supernatural; that there are degrees
of this vision, corresponding to the merits of the elect; that to see
God in His Essence, the intellect is supernaturally perfected; that the