ell is not an obscure and material
slaughter-house, but the Gehenna of evil deliberately chosen; and
heaven is not a pagoda of jewels, but the presence and the light of
God. Hence the "Divine Comedy" belongs to all time and to all place.
While it supremely sums up the particular form assumed by the religion
of the Middle Ages, it contains the eternal elements of all true
religion in the life history of a soul, redeemed from sin and error,
from lust and wrath and greed, and restored to the right path by the
reason and the grace which enable it to see the things that are, and
to see them as they are. The "Inferno," as has been said elsewhere, is
the history of a soul descending through lower and lower stages of
self-will till it sinks at last into those icy depths of Cocytus,
wherein the soul is utterly emptied of God, and utterly filled with
the loathly emptiness of self; the "Purgatory" is the history of the
soul as it is gradually purged from sin and self, by effort and
penitence and hope; the "Paradise" is the soul entirely filled with
the fulness of God.

The moral truths in which the great poem abounds are numberless and of
infinite interest. On these I cannot dwell, for to him who penetrates
to the inner meaning of the allegory they are found on every page. But
I may point out one or two supreme lessons which run throughout the
teaching.

One is the lesson that like makes like--the lesson of modification by
environment. We know how in Norfolk Island the convicts often
degenerated almost into fiends because they associated with natures
which had made themselves fiend-like, and were cut off from gentle,
wholesome, and inspiring influences.

So it is in Dante's "Inferno." His evil men and seducers wax ever
worse and worse because they have none around them save souls lost
like their own. There is no brightening touch in the "Inferno." The
name of Christ is never mentioned in its polluted air. The only angel
who appears in it is not one of the radiant Sympathies, with fair
golden heads and dazzling faces and wings and robes of tender green,
of the "Purgatory," not one of the living topazes or golden splendors
of the "Paradise"; but is stern, disdainful, silent, waving from
before his face all contact with the filthy gloom. His Lucifer is no
flickering, gentlemanly, philosophic man of the world like Goethe's
Mephistopheles, nor like Milton's Fallen Cherub, whose

"Form had not yet lost
All her original