sickle was in the corn the collector came and seized all, because he had made a mistake in his estimate of the returns. In vain the occupier might protest; the State-which meant the collector and his followers should not suffer loss. The despoiled Christian inherited this bondage from his fathers.

Then from another point of the horizon came the mudir and his household army. Horses, silks, satins, whatever had escaped the collector, were carried off. Later on the pacha or the camaican came or sent for their shares, but as there were no other spoils left from the gleanings of the first visitors, maidens for these important officers, together with children for the slave market, were seized upon, and up to 1828 boys in infancy, collected like the tithes of lambs in another country, were taken from their parents for the renewal of that famous corps, the janissaries. The tributes wrung from weakness and despair by the Sultan's officers and His Highness are told in part in this page. The record of a day of distress and shame, of ruined homes, of murdered men and undone women is the record of each hour since the Turk started on his mission against Christ.

In the face of such a story expediencies of policy cannot justify the conscience of the English people. England has bound herself to protect the Sultan's possessions in Asia. We have not the time and we do not desire the space to consider this engagement. It is morally indefensible unless indeed a commission with sufficient power to protect the Christians throughout that large area should be appointed. As we have said, the considerations attending this political attitude are too complex to be discussed at the end of a paper. We shall simply return to the line we have taken, namely, to say that as province after province has crumbled away from the Sultan's rule in Europe; that as all his people and the traditions of the House of Osman itself, so far as they were permitted to pass Seraglio Point in the pupilage of any prince that ever succeeded to the throne or escaped the bow-string, bear testimony to a belief, or a judgment, or some racial intuition that the Turk's stay in Europe was from the first destined to be only temporary, the fulfillment of that destiny which is in reality the Nemesis of accumulated crimes crying to heaven for vengeance, should be accomplished by the European Powers.

Mahommedan instincts, passions, modes of thought are incompatible with Christianity. The Turkish mind itself is incapable of civilization as we understand it. Let there be no confusion; let no one speak of the Moors in Spain, of the Syrians, who gave a polished splendor to the court of the Caliphs. If you withdraw from the Turk the control of irresponsible power which holds him to a locality, the necessity of even that primitive organization which binds together the units of a savage army against enemies, you will find him a Tartar horseman, speeding from dawn to sunset in his raids of robbery and massacre, cooking under his saddle the steaks cut from the living cow, drinking in the teeth of the Koran the kumiss of his ancestors, sleeping off in his black tent the effects of the meat he has eaten beyond repletion and the drink he has quaffed to intoxication.

It is for such a monster England forgets Magna Charta, the Bill of Rights, the reign of an ever broadening law, the purity of domestic life, the justice of public life.

New York, N. Y.

GEORGE MCDERMOT, C. S. P.

DANTE AS A TEACHER AND PREACHER OF RIGHTEOUSNESS.

HE central man of all the world," according to Mr. Ruskin, "as representing the imaginative, moral and intellectual faculties all at their highest is Dante." It is not the purpose of this paper to treat of Dante as a poet, pointing out his rare felicity of language, the beauty of his poetic similes, the many delicate touches which show his keen and loving observation of nature for instance, his accurate descriptions of the tender hues of the dawn, the delicate tints of flowers and herbage, the radiant beauty of his angels in the "Purgatorio," What in the whole range of literature is there to equal the poetic beauty of the Earthly Paradise?-Matilda culling flowers on the banks of the stream, the glorious pageant in which appears the triumphal chariot representing the Church, accompanied by the seven allegorical virtues, the twentyfour Elders and the four Gospel Beasts described by Ezekiel and St. John. And how shall we follow the poet as he wings his flight into the Empyrean, the highest heaven? Words are feeble to express the keenness and subtlety of his vision as he describes for us the glories of Paradise. No uninspired writer approaches him in sublimity as he tells of the angelic hierarchies, the hosts of the redeemed, Free Will and other deep things of God.

Then, too, any account of the poet as poet must take into consideration the technique of his verse the terza rima of the "Commedia," the construction of the three cantiche of the poem and the exquisite structural symmetry and correspondences of the sonnets and canzoni of the "Vita Nuova."

Touching for a moment or two only upon the intellectual faculties of Dante, rated so high by Mr. Ruskin, we note that our poet was master of all the learning of his time-indeed, that the range of his learning was encyclopædic. We know from the evidence afforded by his works, especially the "Commedia" and the "Convivio," how intimate was his knowledge of Aristotle, “ill maestro di color che sanno," the master of those that know; of Vergil, his dear guide and more than father; of Thomas Aquinas, the great scholastic philosopher. We know that he studied for his degree at Paris, then famous for its schools of theology and philosophy. I for one should be glad to believe as firmly as does Dean Plumptree that Dante studied at Oxford.2

But besides all the learning of the schools and of antiquity, we know that Dante was keenly interested in problems of physical science. It would seem from many passages in his books that he had some premonition of the theory of gravitation. In many other passages there are references to the influence of the sun and moon on the tides, while in the latest years of his life he busied himself with the question of land and water on the earth. We know, too, that the laws of the refraction of light possessed for him a keen fascination.

But it is not the intellectual quality nor yet the poetical or imaginative quality in the "Divina Commedia" that makes it the great force, the power in men's lives that it is. We all remember De Quincey's distinction between the literature of knowledge and the literature of power. Thought without feeling gives us science; thought interpenetrated with feeling gives us literature. It was because Dante had felt much as well as thought much, had felt with all the intensity of his passionate, sensitive nature, had felt the loss of all things dear unto him, had proved how salt is the taste of another's bread-ah me"si come sa di sale lo pane altrui," how hard the path to go up and down another's stair-had felt the longing homesickness of exile, the bitter pains and humiliations of poverty-it was because of all these experiences of life that he was able to project his heart and soul into the poem which Tieck calls a "mystic, unfathomable song."

To quote from Scartazzini: "A consummate artist, he turned to account experience and fortune, character and morals, joy and sorrow, love and hatred, virtue and vice, life and death and added thereto the collected wisdom of his age."

Unlike Homer and Shakespeare, who had the rare power of detaching themselves from and of standing outside of their work as it were, he impressed his own individuality upon his great poem, especially upon the "Purgatorio," until it reads in some measure as his autobiography.

And so it is that this great poem that made Dante lean for many a year has its message for us in the twentieth century, because it is the history of a human soul in its moral warfare the flesh, the world and the devil in league against it, and sometimes baffling its efforts in its progress upwards to reach the highest good.

Carlyle tells us that if all had gone well with Dante in Florence, if he had been Podestà, had been well accepted with his neighbors, the world would have wanted this song of his. But years before this he had deliberately resolved after the death of Beatrice, in 1290, that if his life should be spared he would write of her, the "glorious lady of his mind," what had never yet been written of any woman. It is incontestable that much of the depth of feeling, the dramatic intensity of the "Divina Commedia," many of the terrible episodes of the "Inferno" are directly traceable to the violent political feuds of the time, in which Dante as a citizen of Florence was unhappily involved. But the year 1300 had in some way been a turning-point in the poet's life. This is the assumed date of the poem-"Nel mezzo del cammin di nostra vita"-"Midway in the path of this our life." Dante, born in 1265, had now reached the age of thirty-five, half the span of years allotted to man by the Psalmist. In his vision he finds himself in the midst of a dark wood. Some interpret this by saying that Dante had fallen into loose and immoral ways. Dante himself says in the "Convivio" that to comfort himself for the loss of Beatrice he had betaken himself to the study of philosophy in the writings of Cicero and Boethius, and so enamored did he become of this new study, which he represents under the guise of a "noble lady," that he forsook the study of theology, by which we are to understand his devotion to Beatrice. Difficulties confront us whichever way we look at the passage. Some explain it by saying that the poet wandered from the true faith and lost his way in the mazes of doubt. We are reminded of the dictum of Tennyson:

There lives more faith in honest doubt,
Believe me, than in half the creeds.

At any rate, when the weary pilgrim has attained the summit of the Mount of Purification, Beatrice sternly rebukes him for turning "his steps by a way not true."

And so, guided by Vergil, symbol of human reason, Dante takes his way through the different circles of the pit of hell till he arrives at the point furthest away from God, where, imbedded in ice, is Lucifer, once the most beautiful and most glorious of God's creatures, "nobler far than any other creature," are Dante's own words.

It is to show "the exceeding sinfulness of sin," its heinousness, nay, its foulness, that Dante, now in words rough and raucous, again by imagery most grotesque and horrible, pictures the deed and its symbolic punishment.

In C. xi. of the "Inferno" Vergil explains to Dante the nature of sin. All sins may be divided into (1) those of incontinence, (2) those of bestiality or violence, (3) those of malice or fraud. The incontinent-that is, the carnal minded, the gluttonous, the avaricious and prodigal-sin from want of self-control, from impulses which have not yet hardened into habits. They are less displeasing to God, and so their punishment is less severe than that meted out to sins of the reason and the will. "The good of the intellect," says Thomas Aquinas, "is the knowledge of God, which is the true beatitude of every human soul." So the perversion of the intellect, the using of the powers of the mind to do violence to God or to one's neighbor involves the soul in a fearful responsibility and drags it down ever lower and lower.

Indulgence in sin degrades the soul till the body which inhabits becomes brutish like the beasts. The greatest sinners are traitorstraitors to God and country. Accordingly Judas, the betrayer of Christ; Brutus and Cassius, slayers of Cæsar, are placed in the lowest pit, continually flayed and champed upon by Satan.

There is a certain correspondence between the sin and its punishment. The carnal minded are swayed along by a fierce whirlwind, as they were moved on earth by the restlessness of their evil desires. The gluttons wallow in mud, their bodies distorted by the indulgence of their appetites, their minds darkened. Descending much further, we come upon the evil counsellors, who, as they sinned with their tongues, are imprisoned within a tongue of fire in the very heart of hell. The barrators, those who make a traffic in places of public trust and who sell justice for money, are immersed in pitch, symbol of the clinging, defiling power of money when gained by dishonest, unholy means. Dante was an idealist in civil government as he was in ecclesiastical polity, and in describing the politicians and unjust judges of the early part of the fourteenth century he spares no scornful epithets. Indeed, the canto in which they appear is the hardest to read in the whole "Inferno."

It is greatly to be regretted that so many who begin with the "Inferno" there stop short, deterred from reading further by the disagreeable impressions received from the horrible scenes of violence in the lower circles of the dolorous realm. Many, too, gain