thought proper for itself on everybody else also; and so striving to make one artless, letterless, and merciless monastery of all the world. Its virulent effort broke down amidst furies of reactionary dissoluteness and disbelief, and remains now the basest of popular solders and plasters for every condition of broken law and bruised conscience which interest can provoke, or hypocrisy disguise.
57. With the subsequent quarrels between the two great sects of the corrupted church, about
them—as to Virgil—it was part of the Eastern vision of a circling stream of life from which only a few drops were at intervals tossed to a definitely permanent Elysium or a definitely permanent Hell. It suits that scheme better than it does the Christian one, which attaches ultimately in all cases infinite importance to the results of life in hoc sseculo.
"Do you know any representation of Heaven or Hell unconnected with the Last Judgment? I don't remember any, and as Purgatory is by that time past, this would account for the absence of pictures of it.
"Besides, Purgatory precedes the Resurrection—there is continual question among divines what manner of purgatorial fire it may be that affects spirits separate from the body—perhaps Heaven and Hell, as opposed to Purgatory, were felt to be picturable because not only spirits, but the risen bodies too are conceived in them.
"Bede's account of the Ayrshire seer's vision gives Purgatory in words very like Dante's description of the second stormy circle in Hell; and the angel which ultimately saves the Scotchman from the fiends comes through hell, -quasi fulgor stelke micantis inter tenebras '—' qual sulpresso del mattino Per gli grossi vapor Marie rosseggia.' Bede's name was great in the middle ages. Dante meets him in Heaven, and, I like to hope, may have been helped by the vision of my fellow' countryman more than six hundred years before."
