the high mountain, assist my longing with kindly piety. I was of Montefeltro; I am Buonconte. Neither Joan [my wife] nor anyone else takes thought of me; wherefore I walk among these [souls] with bended brow.' And I responded: 'What power or what chance so removed thee from Campaldino that thy burial place hath never been found?' 'O!' he replied, at the foot of the Casentino pours a stream named Archiano, which is born in the Apennines above the Hermitage. To the spot where its appellation becomes useless [because the river there merges with the Arno] I came, with my throat cut, fleeing on foot and wetting the plain with blood. There my sight failed, and my speech fled, ending with the name of Mary; and there I fell, and my flesh was left alone. I shall tell thee the truth, and do thou repeat it among the living. God's angel took me; and one from Hell shouted: "O thou from Heaven, why dost thou rob me? Thou shalt carry away this man's eternal part, all on account of one little tear, which snatches him from me. But of the rest I shall make a different disposal." Well thou knowest how the air collects that moist vapor which turns back to water as soon as it rises high enough to be caught by the cold. That spirit, combining intelligence with ill-will which seeks naught but harm, moved mist and wind with the power its nature gave it. Then, when the day was spent, it covered with clouds the valley between Pratomagno and the great chain, and made the sky above it so tense that the teeming air

turned to water. The rain descended; and as much of it as earth could not support ran into gullies; and, coming together in great torrents, it plunged toward the royal river so swift that naught could check it. The raging Archiano found my frozen body at its mouth, and pushed it into the Arno, and undid upon my breast the cross that I had made of myself, when pain conquered me; it whirled me along banks and bottom, then swathed and begirt me with its booty.'

Captain of his soul is every living Christian: his eternal fate depends eventually on himself. But man can find his Paradise only through Christ. "Neither is there salvation in any other: for there is none other name under heaven given among men, whereby we must be saved." The doctrines of his faith Dante accepted unreservedly, dwelt with them night and day, and, as we have seen, invested them in his mind with fresh substance and color. Unflinching belief in the power and goodness of God and the final triumph of justice, reverence for the external Church as the divinely established representative of the Church spiritual, close obedience to the rightful authority in matters of religion all this was for him beyond question. Dante furiously resented the outrage done at Anagni to Pope Boniface VIII, whom he regarded, nevertheless, as an unscrupulous villain, doomed to Hell, the arch-enemy of his cause. Even the Emperor, whose independence Dante so passionately championed, must, according to him, respect the Pope as an elder son respects a

father. The office, the religious function, was never confused by our poet with the man who exercised it. Unsparing he always was in criticism of the unworthy incumbent, untiring in his denunciation of wicked prelates; strict, too, in drawing the line between ecclesiastical dominion and individual right. A fraudulent absolution, as we have seen, is of no avail; equally impotent is an unjust excommunication. At the foot of the mountain of Purgatory Dante meets the shade of the beloved Manfred, chief of the Ghibellines, son of Emperor Frederick II. He, like his father, died under the ban of the Church. It was in 1266, at the great battle of Benevento, that he fell. His body was covered by his soldiers with a pile of stones, near the end of a bridge; but Pope Clement IV, unwilling to let his bones rest in peace, dispatched to the battle-field the Cardinal Archbishop of Cosenza, who had the remains disinterred and cast out of the papal realm, beside the river Verde. Yet Manfred, genuinely repentant at the end, -as Dante thought, and a good Christian at heart, found forgiveness; whereas his father, the great Emperor, an impenitent heretic, was damned. I shall conclude with Manfred's story. Dante has been looking at a group of shades.

And one began: "Whoe'er thou art, abide,
O thou that walkest on, look back again!
Hast ever seen me on the other side?

I turned to him, and gazed with might and main.
Handsome and blond was he, a princely guest;
An ugly wound had cleft his brow in twain.

When I with proper meekness had confest

I ne'er had seen him, he exclaimed: "Now see!" And showed a scar high up upon his breast. "Manfred am I," he then said smilingly,

Grandson of Empress Constance, Henry's wife.
And when thou shalt return, I beg of thee,
Seek out my beauteous daughter, who gave life
To Aragon's and Sicily's great lords;
Tell her the truth, if false report is rife.
When I was split by two death-dealing swords,
My rueful soul I weeping did resign
To him who gladly pardons and rewards.
My sins were horrible; but grace divine,
With loving, all-embracing arms outspread,
Takes every soul that doth to it incline.
And if Cosenza's shepherd, who was sped
By Clement on my track, revenge to reap,
That page of holy writ had rightly read,
My body's bones still peacefully would sleep
Near Benevento, where the bridge is past,
Protected by the ponderous stony heap.
Rain wets them now, and rattles them the blast,
Outside the realm, not far from Verde's cleft,
Where he, with lightless candles, had them cast.
No curse of theirs can leave us so bereft

That God's eternal love may not come back,
As long as hope hath any greenness left."

[From Dante, p. 41.]

LECTURE II

MORALITY

THE doctrine of free will, which I discussed in my first lecture, implies individual moral responsibility a salutary principle, even though it be not in accord with the theories of sociology or the inclinations of sentiment. Nowadays we are all too disposed to put the blame for wrongdoing on heredity, environment, organization — anywhere but on the wrongdoer. However beautiful the impulse that prompts to such extenuation of crime, it certainly does not tend to check criminality. Dante's age knew no such amiable weakness. The criminal was not yet encouraged to look upon himself as a victim, rather than an offender, and consequently knew what to expect, here and hereafter. And Dante himself admitted no compromise with sin: a stern judge both of other men's deeds and of his own, he held all to the strictest account.

Sin is a wicked act of the will; and it consists in an erroneous choice between good and evil, the latter seeming under the circumstances preferable to the former. If we are attracted by unworthy things, it is not our fault: sin begins when we give way to the attraction, against the advice of conscience. Temptation is man's lot. Without it,