r clear understanding of their books.
Dante to be intelligible to the modern mind, cannot be taken out of the
thirteenth century. "Its contemporary history and its contemporary
spirit" says Brother Azarias in his Phases of Thought and Criticism,
"constitute his clearest and best commentary." Only in the light of this
commentary can we hope to know his message and realize its supremacy.
And that it is worth while to make the study there can be no doubt upon
the part of any seeker of truth and admirer of beauty.

Emerson said: "I think if I were a professor of rhetoric I should use
Dante for my text-book. Dante is the rhetorician. He is all wings, pure
imagination and he writes like Euclid." James Russell Lowell told his
students in answer to the question as to the best course of reading to
be followed: "If I may be allowed a personal illustration, it was my
own profound admiration for the Divina Commedia of Dante that lured me
into what little learning I possess." Gladstone declared: "In the school
of Dante I learned a great part of that mental provision ... which has
served me to make the journey of human life." It surely must be of
inestimable advantage to sit under the instruction of one of the race's
master teachers who stimulates one to lofty thinking and deep feeling,
leads one into realms of wider knowledge and helps one to know his own
age by revealing a mighty past.

To see that mighty past, to live again with Dante in the thirteenth
century is possible only after we have cleared the way with which
ignorance and misrepresentation have encumbered the approach. Here,
perhaps, more than in any other period of civilization is the dictum
true that history is often a conspiracy against the truth. We moderns
who are not only obsessed with the theory of evolution, but are
dominated by the idea that nothing of permanent value can come from
medievalism, arrogantly proclaim that ours is the greatest of centuries
because we have not only what all other centuries had, but something
else distinctively our own--a vast contribution to the world's progress.
This self-complacency makes us forget that whatever truth there may be
in the great theory of evolution, certainly the validity of the theory
is not confirmed by the intellectual history of the human race. As was
said of the Patriarchal Age so we may say of Dante's times "there were
giants in those days" which we presume to ignore. Homer, Shakespeare,
Dante, indeed stand for