The opposite type is Frances, a joyful prophet of glad
tidings to the poor; ardent, sympathetic, heroic; touched with the beauty
of nature and the appeal of the animal creation; exalting simplicity and
poverty like an ancient philosopher; seeking the needy and sorrowful like
Jesus of Nazareth; but with no spiritual originality like Jesus, no power
to create a new religion; strong only to revive the best elements of the
traditional faith, and to organize a society which erelong sank back to
the general level of the church.

Dante is an embodiment of mediaeval belief in its most sublime and
intense phase. He has much of the temper of the Hebrew psalmist, in his
tremendous love and hate, his patriotism, his sorrow, his quest for the
highest. This vast spiritual passion finds its expression and
satisfaction in an invisible world, which promises in a future existence
the supreme triumph and reign of a divine justice, wrath, and pity, and
for which the visible world is but antechamber and probation. Dante
shows the culmination of supernatural Christianity, but he has something
further. The guide of his pilgrimage, the star of his hope, the
inspiration of his life, is a woman,--loved with sublimation and
tenderness, loved better after her death, and felt as the living link
between the seen and unseen worlds. Thus at the heart of the old
supernaturalism is the germ of a new conception, in which human love
sanctified by death becomes the revealer.

In Dante we feel that the projection of human interest to an unseen and
future world has reached its furthest limit. The mind of man must needs
revert to some nearer home and sphere. And closely following Dante we
see in England a group of figures who betoken the return. There is
Chaucer, displaying the various energy and joy and humor of earthly life.
There is Piers Plowman, showing the grim obverse of the medal, the
hardship and woe of the poor. Wyclif insists on a personal religion,
whose austere edge turns against ecclesiastical pretense and social
wrong; and he applies reason so daringly that it cuts at the very centre
of the church's dogma, in denying Transubstantiation. A little earlier
we see Roger Bacon making a fresh beginning in the experimental
philosophy which had been slighted for centuries. These four are the
precursors respectively of the purely human view, as in Shakspere, of the
elevation of the poor, of Protestantism, and of natural science.

As pagan