rging a plain duty.

Earthly pleasure was dangerous, but in suffering lay medicinal virtue.
One mark of the saint was self-inflicted pain. The highest symbol of
religion was the cross, emblem of torture and death.

The belief in a hell of endless suffering was the parent of a monstrous
and ghastly brood of imaginations. How far the dread thus inspired acted
as a wholesome deterrent we can only guess. Too well we know the torture
it wrought in sensitive and apprehensive natures, the pangs of fear which
mothers suffered, the sense of a curse overhanging a part of mankind,
which even in our own day darkens many a life, and which in a more
unquestioning age rested like a pall on countless hearts.

Such were among the beliefs, the consistent and logical beliefs, of the
mediaeval churchmen. Thus the moral mischiefs which infested society had
their roots partly in that conception of religion which in other
directions bore noble fruit.

Dante shows the culmination of the Catholic idea; he shows emerging from
it a new idealization of human relations; and he stands as one of the
master-spirits of humanity, to whom all after-ages listen reverently.

There is in Dante a boundless terror and a boundless hope. Compared with
the antique world there is a new tenderness and a new remorse. Hell,
Purgatory, Heaven are the projections of man's fear, his purification,
his hope.

Dante shows the vision which had grown up and possessed the belief of
men--a terror matched with a glory and tenderness. But in Dante is a
force beyond this theologic belief--the spiritual love of a man and
woman. It is personal, intense, pure, sacramental. Thirteen hundred
years of Christianity had inwrought a new purity. Out of chivalry,
half-barbaric, had grown a new sentiment toward woman. If was truly a
"new life."

Through Dante's early story,--the vestibule by which we are led to the
"Divina Commedia,"--through this "Vita Nuova," there runs a poignancy
which has almost more of pain than pleasure. Under an earthly symbol it
is the vision of the ideal--the unattainable--the passion of the soul for
what lies beyond its full grasp.

In form Dante reproduces the Catholic theology. In reality he lives by
the ideal relation with Beatrice. For him the true Purgatory is his
self-reproach in her presence. The boundless joy of reunion after a
lifelong separation is checked on the threshold, that the intense light
of that moment may illumine the