time I do not know,—­opened the future of hope amid the speculations of despair.  She saved the Middle Ages from universal gloom.  If speculation or logic or tradition or scripture pointed to a hell of reprobation, there must be also a purgatory as the field of expiation,—­for expiation there must be for sin, somewhere, somehow, according to immutable laws, unless a mantle of universal forgiveness were spread over sinners who in this life had given no sufficient proofs of repentance and faith.  Expiation was the great element of Mediaeval theology.  It may have been borrowed from India, but it was engrafted on the Christian system.  Sometimes it was made to take place in this life; when the sinner, having pleased God, entered at once upon heavenly beatitudes.  Hence fastings, scourgings, self-laceration, ascetic rigors in dress and food, pilgrimages,—­all to purchase forgiveness; which idea of forgiveness was scattered to the winds by Luther, and replaced by grace,—­faith in Christ attested by a righteous life.  I allude to this notion of purgatory, which early entered into the creeds of theologians, and which was adopted by the Catholic Church, to show how powerful it was when human consciousness sought a relief from the pains of endless physical torments.

After Dante had written his Purgatorio, he retired to the picturesque mountains which separate Tuscany from Modena and Bologna; and in the hospitium of an ancient monastery, “on the woody summit of a rock from which he might gaze on his ungrateful country, he renewed his studies in philosophy and theology.”  There, too, in that calm retreat, he commenced his Paradiso, the subject of profound meditations on what was held in highest value in the Middle Ages.  The themes are theological and metaphysical.  They are such as interested Thomas Aquinas and Bonaventura, Anselm and Bernard.  They are such as do not interest this age,—­even the most gifted minds,—­for our times are comparatively indifferent to metaphysical subtleties and speculations.  Beatrice and Peter and Benedict alike discourse on the recondite subjects of the Bible in the style of Mediaeval doctors.  The themes are great,—­the incarnation, the immortality of the soul, the resurrection of the body, salvation by faith, the triumph of Christ, the glory of Paradise, the mysteries of the divine and human natures; and with these disquisitions are reproofs of bad popes, and even of some of the bad customs of the Church, like indulgences, and the corruptions of the monastic system.  The Paradiso is a thesaurus of Mediaeval theology,—­obscure, but lofty, mixed up with all the learning of the age, even of the lives of saints and heroes and kings and prophets.  Saint Peter examines Dante upon faith, James upon hope, and John upon charity.  Virgil here has ceased to be his guide; but Beatrice, robed in celestial loveliness, conducts him from circle to circle, and explains the sublimest doctrines and resolves his mortal doubts,—­the object still of his adoration, and inferior only to the mother of our Lord, regina angelorum, mater carissima, whom the Church even then devoutly worshipped, and to whom the greatest sages prayed.