excuse for putting them aside. It is this which takes off the native beauty from the fair forehead of a child-like faith, and leaves, not the scars of a much-questioning and often-failing but still believing search after God, whom so to seek is to find, but the vacancy of contented worldliness or the sneer of the baffled pleasure-seeker."

If, then, we think, as the great souls of all time have thought, that religion is the power that binds man to what is best and highest, we shall be on the alert against this "undermining indifference" and this "vacancy of contented worldliness" of which Green speaks. Is it not too true that modern civilization, with its sense of security, its comfort and luxury, and the ignoble greed of gain which the attractiveness of these has bred, tends to produce such an undermining indifference and contented worldliness? These, the enemies of religion, are the hindrances to that renascence of our social life of which I spoke in the opening of my paper. The first work in the promotion of that renascence is, I said, to gain a new philosophy-that is, a new view of the world, which shall give life unity and import. But it is a difficult task to induce men, prone to this indifference and worldliness and sorely tempted by it, to make the effort to think out a new philosophy of life. How are they to be braced to make it? What can we do to counteract the tendencies of the time? We cannot, of course, do anything until we ourselves have gained a new philosophy; and, having gained it, we must express it by word and deed. If we are bent on trying to find the philosophy, we cannot do better than go to Green. There is every indication that it is along the lines of his thought that advance will be made.

If, further, we pass from philosophy to religion, here again we shall find in Green a helpful ally. We may not get entire satisfaction from the form in which he would cast religion; but in the spirit of the religion which he upholds we cannot steep our, selves too deep. And one point upon which he insists, as we have already gathered, we can not pay too much heed to-that, if we wish to bear witness for religion, we must do so through our lives. Nothing promotes skepticism so much as disloyalty; it gives the skeptic, the cynic, and the indifferentist their chance and excuse. It is an undoubted fact that what, more than anything else, is bringing Christianity, and with it all religion, into disrepute

is the disloyalty of Christendom to the lofty professions of its creed. It is futile to profess to believe that all men are brethren, if we treat them as enemies on the mart and in the store. It is useless professing to believe that it is difficult for a rich man to enter into the Kingdom of Heaven, if we devote a life to getting rich. It is a mockery to declare adhesion to the principle that human greatness is won by service, if we despise those who serve, and strive for a worldly position in which we are the masters of many servants. If we follow Green's teaching, we must believe that the first condition upon which the revolution now in progress may be a change for the better, lies in our making our lives eloquent with the spirit of unswerving devotion to our ideal.

ON THE CONGRUENCE OF SINS AND PUNISHMENTS IN DANTE'S INFERNO.

TRANSLATED FROM THE GERMAN OF DR. J. A. SCARTAZZINI ("JAHRBUCH DER DEUTSCHEN DANTE-GESELLSCHAFT," VOL. IV, 1877) BY THEKLA BERNAYS.

According to Christian popular belief, an almost absolute transformation takes place in man at the moment of death. The life hereafter is not, in the first instance, the direct continuation of the psychic spiritual earth-life of the individual, but rather, according to current Christian notions, an entirely new life, with scarcely a resemblance to earth-life, and connected with this latter only inasmuch as in its immense variety it is conditioned by it (earth-life) for each individual. More clearly expressed, it depends upon the conduct of man while on earth-whether he will reach the abode of infinite blessedness or the regions of indescribable torture. But when once the narrow bridge is passed which forms the mysterious crossing between this world and the hereafter, then is fulfilled in its absolute sense the word: "The old is vanished; see, all has become new!" According to this conception, even the most individual thing in man, his consciousness, is subjected to a mighty change. The consciousness of one and the same individual changes in part as to its contents as soon as the journey through the dark valley is completed. The Christian who

starts upon his upward journey relies upon receiving in the river of death the magic drink of Lethe, which will wash away out of his consciousness everything that could in any way dim his feeling of absolute beatitude. According to the same Christian, however, he who is condemned to take the opposite route must in the selfsame river of death drink of Lethe, which, on the contrary, extinguishes from his consciousness whatever might shed a ray of light into the unending dark night of his eternal life. But the regions of the worlds beyond have only too great a resemblance to those here below. The colors in which pious fancy paints the abodes of eternity are taken throughout from temporal life. Here a world of infinite enjoyment and delight, there a world of infinite torture and privation; both, however-enjoyment and privation, delight and torture—are more sensual than spiritual, more external than internal; a world similar to the one here below-only its inhabitants are quite different.

This is the common popular belief, these are the current notions. We will not here investigate the question in how far this belief and its conceptions may be based upon the Scriptures. Even if we were forced to admit such a basis, this would only prove that the Bible is, as to origin and purpose, a true people's book, and not a compendium of metaphysics. Purified modern philosophical thought, to be sure, as far as it does not believe itself in duty bound to deny the hereafter, forms conceptions of it which essentially differ from those mentioned. A world wholly different from this, because purely spiritual, yet the people who inhabit it, inasmuch as they are spiritual beings, are the same ones that once walked this earth. Consciousness is the same, infinitely developing in a straight line. No Lethe is to be found either in the one direction or in the other, but in the hereafter a further development of that which had begun here below to germinate and to unfold. In this application the reference to the analogy between birth and death was very appropriate. As the new-born child is the same that it was before birth, so too the human being who yonder reawakens to consciousness will be the same he was before he threw off this mortal frame. Here, as there, is found simple development, though upon a wholly different territory. Hence heaven and hell are nothing external, but purely internal; not merely in the future, but already in the present-be

ginning here, reaching there to completion. In the hereafter take place the disclosure, development, and heightening of that which existed here below, but which man is often able to hide from himself and others by means of the senses and the sensual.

The more complete following out of this thought does not belong to the province of the investigation and study of Dante, but must be left to metaphysics and philosophical dogmatics. Occasion will offer in the course of this disquisition to mention whatever of this is indispensable to the understanding of the problem under discussion.

Standing upon the boundary-line separating two epochs, Dante intones his song. His poem is a requiem, and at the same time a cradle-song. With one foot he stands upon the territory of the middle ages, with the other he is already upon that of modern times. As in all other, so too in his eschatological ideas, he is a child of his time; but he is, besides this, the prophet who with deep and far-reaching presage hastens on in advance of his time. Dante's conception of the hereafter is based not upon mediæval belief alone, but in part too upon deeper metaphysico-psychological cognition. He has transferred much that is sensual from the temporal into eternity, driven perhaps in part by the necessity of painting a picture which should clearly show to man, cleaving as yet to the sensual, the purely spiritual, and that which is but foreshadowed in his mind. The punishments and expiations of his Inferno and Mount of Purification partake as much of a sensual as of a spiritual nature-perhaps more of the former than of the latter. But if sometimes the internal connection seems often missing between sin and punishment-such a connection that the one appears as the unavoidable result of the other-this connection must always be presupposed in Dante, and the more so with him, as it is clearly apparent in many instances. If, owing to the guidance of scriptural passages like Job, xxi, 7-26, Psalms, lxxiii, 2-14, the inclination has been but too great heretofore to relegate the punishment following sin entirely to the hereafter, making blessedness here to be followed by misery there, and misery here by blessedness yonder, in Dante, on the contrary, the realms of the hereafter are realized none the less in the present life. Poeta agit de inferno isto in quo peregrinando mereri et demereri possumus. These words do not originate with Dante; they are a saying of

ancient times, but it is nevertheless a saying which undoubtedly gives the poet's meaning a clear and universally intelligible expression.

Whoever engages more deeply in the study of the "sacred poem" does not to-day doubt the truth of the position that this poem proposes to hold up for contemplation not only the revealed truth of the hereafter, but also the revealed truth of the inner self, and that its contents are not merely of a metaphysical, but fully as much of an ethical nature; the revealed truth of the inner self also, but not this alone. Those who deny the reference to the hereafter in the Divina Commedia err no less than those who deny its reference to earth-life. Both references are inseparably, organically united. Whatever was prepared here below is there completed; what there becomes visible to the prophetic eye of the poet has been already felt here below in the bosom of the individual. Punishment and bliss are the fruit maturing in the temporal, on toward eternity. Both damnation and blessedness, weal and woe, are not something imposed from without, but rather something developing out of the inner being.

In accordance with this, the punishments of the Inferno in Dante-and this disquisition is for the present limited to these, to the exclusion of the expiations of the Mount of Purification and the delights of Paradise-these punishments must be developed from the corresponding sins, and it must be possible to show how they are their product, how they spring from them by an inner necessity. It is by no means claimed that this is a new thought; it is one which has, on the contrary, often found expression. But the relation, the inner connection between sin and punishment, has not hitherto been deemed worthy of a thorough investigation; and yet such an investigation might prove of greater value than the numerous and sometimes very prolix ones upon difficulties of a very inferior nature, such as on the Piè fermo, on Plutus's unintelligible words, or Ugolino's alleged eating of his children.

The centre of the universe is the lowest region of Dante's Inferno, and at the same time that spot in the universe which is farthest removed from God. Now, as it is sin which estranges man from God, as the difference, the chasm between man and God must be wider in proportion as the sin to whose service man had devoted himself is heavier, the gradation from above downward