are brought out in tremendous language the opinions of the Middle
Ages in reference to retribution. Dante does not rise above them,
with all his genius; he is not emancipated from them. It is the
rarest thing in this world for any man, however profound his
intellect and bold his spirit, to be emancipated from the great and
leading ideas of his age. Abraham was, and Moses, and the founder
of Buddhism, and Socrates, and Mohammed, 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 ingenious 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