and Luther; but they were reformers, more or less divinely commissioned,
with supernatural aid in many instances to give them wisdom. But Homer
was not, nor Euripides, nor the great scholastics of the Middle Ages,
nor even popes. The venerated doctors and philosophers, prelates,
scholars, nobles, kings, to say nothing of the people, thought as Dante
did in reference to future punishment,--that it was physical, awful,
accumulative, infinite, endless; the wrath of avenging deity displayed
in pains and agonies inflicted on the body, like the tortures of
inquisitors, thus appealing to the fears of men, on which chiefly the
power of the clergy was based. Nor in these views of endless physical
sufferings, as if the body itself were eternal and indestructible, is
there the refinement of Milton, who placed misery in the upbraidings of
conscience, in mental torture rather than bodily, in the everlasting
pride and rebellion of the followers of Satan and his fallen angels. It
was these awful views of protracted and eternal physical torments,--not
the hell of the Bible, but the hell of priests, of human
invention,--which gives to the Middle Ages a sorrowful and repulsive
light, thus nursing superstition and working on the fears of mankind,
rather than on the conscience and the sense of moral accountability. But
how could Dante have represented the ideas of the Middle Ages, if he had
not painted his _Inferno_ in the darkest colors that the imagination
could conceive, unless he had soared beyond what is revealed into the
unfathomable and mysterious and unrevealed regions of the second death?

After various wanderings in France and Italy, and after an interval of
three years, Dante produced the second part of the poem,--the
_Purgatorio_,--in which he assumes another style, and sings another
song. In this we are introduced to an illustrious company,--many beloved
friends, poets, musicians, philosophers, generals, even prelates and
popes, whose deeds and thoughts were on the whole beneficent. These