Not only that the sweet air which by the sun is gladdened to-day has passed away for ever, but that we too may have passed by on the other side, unheeding the sorrow we might have lightened, the joy we might have welcomed, the love we might have strengthened, the pain we might have lessened. Have we added to some one's good to-day? have we not added to some one's harm? Each day is a renewal of our chance while we live, until the day comes when there is no renewal. It is not a gospel of despair, but a gospel of effort. And this is a single line which, whatever men's differing religious professions may be, the whole human race can go on repeating till the end of time as one of the ultimate expressions of life—

"Pensa che questo dì mai non raggiorna.”

E

DANTE AND THE "NEW REFORMATION."1

WHEN we remember that for centuries Catholics tortured Protestants, and that in their turn Protestants tortured Catholics, in the sacred name of religion—a religion, too, supposed to be founded on Divine love—and that they are still ready to rend one another, metaphorically speaking (and to join together in rending "the infidels"), on account of their religious beliefs, it is really very curious and encouraging to find that they can nevertheless lie down amicably together, like the lion and the lamb, in the presence of Dante, the religious poet, notwithstanding that the framework of his great poem is compacted of the very ele

ments that elsewhere have made the two sects 1 Nineteenth Century, February 1890.

irreconcilable. Each sect seems to find in him its special interpreter. Naturally they have a good deal of quiet mutual contempt for each other's interpretations of the interpreter; but, on the whole, they disagree not more unamiably than other literary disputants, and there are no threats of eternal damnation for any heresies. The Positivists and Agnostics have also taken the pre-eminent poet as their prophet, so that to-day he may be said to focus all the conflicting rays of religious thought in the Western world.

Nothing would probably have surprised the poet himself so much as the idea that he might one day prove to be the missing link between belief, resting on theological dogmas, and a coherent social faith-a social faith dependent on the whole range of the past and looking to the future with unstinted hope, tempered by a great awe of the Eternal and of the everlasting reign of Laws, whereof Science is the handmaiden, and not necessarily divorced from a deep mystical tendency, for it will be nourished by the Bible and by all poetry of a high seriousness, as Mr Matthew Arnold has pointed out.

The situation is not only curious, it is suggestive of possibilities. For there is no more noteworthy phenomenon amongst the forces that are at work moulding the thought of our time, than the extraordinary increase in Dante's influence during the last forty years -especially in England and America. It will probably be well within the mark to say that' there are hundreds of readers of the 'Divina Commedia' to-day for every single reader that there was when Dean Church published his well-known scholarly essay in 1850. And this increase has taken place, be it remembered, precisely in the period during which the respect for theological or ecclesiastical-dogmas has been most rapidly decaying, when it might naturally have been expected that the poem would have lost much of its constraining power over the minds and consciences of its readers, owing to the fact that the vast majority of them have ceased to believe in the corporeal realities of Hell, Purgatory, and Paradise. How, then, is the increase to be accounted for? No doubt it is to some extent due to the cheap editions of Longfellow's translation, for the readers of to-day are not

confined to the small circle of Italian scholars. They form a wide public. Then it is a religious book which stands on its intrinsic merits, as the Bible perhaps may some day stand. Every one is permitted to put his own interpretation on the whole scheme and on every incident in it-to adapt its teachings to his own personal idiosyncrasy-and to believe only that which seems to him reasonable to believe. Whatever creeds a man may be brought to recite, he will never practically believe more than that; but the possibilities of belief will, of course, vary, as human minds vary, that which appears perfectly reasonable to one person often appearing in the highest degree unreasonable to another. What all sects claim, in reading Dante, is untrammelled freedom of the reason as well as of the imagination. Hence the interpretations are as numerous as the readers-but no reader goes empty away. There is matter for all.

He

It is true that Dante was professedly a great theologian-but he was something more. was above all things an epoch-making poet, who "carried a light behind"; and he is the true prophet of the New Reformation, because