These words form the sequel of to-day’s Epistle[10] in which the temporary reflection of the Shekinah in Moses’s face is contrasted with the permanent and complete illumination of the Spirit. They form the climax of a passage which, full of mystery and splendour, leads us up to those things which eye hath not seen nor ear heard—to that beatific Vision prepared for God’s unfeigned lovers, who shall shine with His own likeness because and when they “see Him as He is.”

A month from to-day—on the day of the Holy Cross—we shall be celebrating the six hundredth “birthday” into the world beyond of the man whose eagle vision pierced, dazzled but unafraid, into the blazing glory of Paradise—Dante, the pilgrim of the world to come. St. Paul’s inspired and inspiring words bring back to mind the swift upward movement of Dante’s Paradiso, where the spirit mounts from sphere to sphere, from glory to glory, impelled and wafted by the sheer force of Love, till at last, in face of the Triune blessedness, it is plunged into an ineffable joy and wonder—ineffable because, as he says, “as it draweth nigh to its ideal, the object of its longing, our intellect sinketh so deep that memory cannot go back upon the track”—

The glory of which we speak—which makes the Paradiso a marvel of dazzling, but, so to speak, graduated splendour—is the glory of Love, Divine and human; and it is of Dante, the Apostle of Love, that I would speak to you to-day. In this sexcentenary year all the civilised world is acclaiming him, and it is well that our Christian Churches should echo thanksgiving to Almighty God for this most Christian poet, and for the magnificent bequest that he left, not only to Italian literature, but to the world. The Pope in his encyclical last spring[12] bore eloquent testimony to Dante’s loyalty to the Christian heritage, and to the power by which, as a teacher of the Faith, “he being dead, yet speaketh.”

He speaks, indeed, with a voice from six hundred years ago, yet not in the remote language of one nurtured in leisure, ease, and comfort, far from the annoyances and disappointments, the worries and anxieties and ugly problems of the rough-and-tumble world we know. On the contrary, the world in which Dante prayed and strove and studied and dreamed and wrote-the world from which comes down to us the serene glory of his Paradise of Love—was astonishingly like our own on its uglier side: a world of religious and political unrest, of clashing interests and ideals, of faction, violence, and cruelty, of individual and corporate predatory self-assertion; a world in which the poet himself, called to “abandon all that man holds most dear”—

wrought out his great work as a nameless wanderer, and died in bitter exile. So we may listen to him as to one who has a genuine message for us.

THE POET OF LOVE

Amid all that has been said and written this year about the author of the Divina Commedia, there is one note that has rarely, if at all, been struck; yet it is surely, in some sense, the keynote of all his singing. Dante is, from the first and to the last, the poet of Love. “I am one,” he says, “who, when Love breathes in me, take note, and that which he dictates within I express”—

His first book—the Vita Nuova—testifies to this. It represents a new movement in love-poetry.[15] The songs of the Troubadours had been, in their earlier forms, with all their strange beauty, frankly sensual and immoral; and when, after the religious movement of the Albigensian Crusade, a greater strictness had perforce been introduced, they had lost their first warmth and glow and naturalness. The “sweet new style”—Dolce Stil nuovo[16]—of Dante and his circle combined the two requisites of sincere purity and glowing life. The story of the Vita Nuova is the story of the precocious passion of a boy of nearly ten years old for a little girl of nine. It passes through its phase of refined sensuousness and self-absorption, but it emerges as a pure mystic love that leads ultimately up to the very Throne of God.

In the vision with which the book closes—the vision of his Beatrice after God has called her to Himself—lies the germ of the greatest poem of Christendom; the poem which, just because it sings the story of man’s freewill in contact with God’s redeeming grace, has as its supreme and final theme—Love. We are familiar, no doubt, with the main lines of Dante’s vision of the world beyond—of the three kingdoms as he conceived them, of hell, purgatory, and heaven. But I will ask you to be patient if I attempt to sketch for you something of the great contours of each, that we may see together how, for this love-poet, eternal Love dominates and shapes the universe.

His world beyond is conceived in terms partly belonging to the age in which he lived, with its scholastic theology and its Ptolemaic cosmography, partly in terms of the originality of his own genius. Its details and its hard outlines may be largely obsolete; but its lessons are true and effective. It is because of its essential Christianity that Dante’s poetry is so much alive, is more “modern,” as the Papal Encyclical put it, than much actually contemporary poetry that is conceived in the spirit of paganism. Dante, for his soul’s health—and for the benefit of untold generations—must needs pass through all three kingdoms of the world to come, guided by Virgil, who represents human reason. Descending down and down into the very bowels of the earth he sees the doom of unrepented sin. Then, after a wearying subterranean climb from earth’s centre to the antipodes, he emerges at the foot of the lofty terraced mountain where repentant souls are cleansed and brought back to their primal innocence. At the top of this mountain he finds himself in the earthly paradise, and meets Beatrice, the glorified “lady of his mind,” who now represents at once Revelation and Grace; sees wondrous things, submits to mystic rites, and finally is drawn up side by side with her, by the motive power of Love, from sphere to sphere, up to the Throne of God, where the redeemed worship Him for ever in the form of a mystic white rose. That Love is the motive power in Paradise is obvious. It is the radiant beauty of Beatrice, ever more dazzling as they mount higher, that lifts him up, and the spirits he meets glow one and all with the fire of Divine charity. It is not easy, perhaps, to detect the influence of Love in the dark abyss of the Inferno, or in the stern, long discipline of the Mount of Purgation.

But love is written even across the portal of Hell. “Abandon hope all ye that enter here” we all know as its inscription; but that is but the last line of a nine-line title, and part of that title runs thus—“Divine Power made me, and Highest Wisdom, and Primal Love”—

This means, of course, the Blessed Trinity, but the last word about the Blessed Trinity is—Love. Love can be stern, and outraged love can draw down, as it were, by the law of being rather than by such vengeful wrath as we humanly attribute to the Most High, an unimaginable ruin and loss upon the outrager. In the stern, grim, cruel, sometimes grotesquely revolting picture Dante draws of the eternal future sinners can deliberately make for themselves, we see but the fruits of Love offered and rejected—the inevitable outcome of their own choice.

When we enter the second kingdom, and begin to climb the mount which forms the pedestal to Eden, the home of man’s innocency, the breath of Love is stronger and its radiance more clear. It reveals itself in the changing beauty of sky and landscape, in the glories of star-light, dawn and sunset and high noon, in the glad brilliance of wild-flowers, in the melody and harmony of music, but, not least, in the very structure and arrangement of Purgatory. Seven terraces ring the mountain round—one above another—separated by rugged cliffs and sheer precipices which Dante needs all his cragsmanship to overcome. And on each terrace one of the seven deadly sins is purged—Pride, Envy, Anger, Sloth, Avarice, Gluttony, Lust. These are arranged on a scheme which brings into relief a great principle—that all our actions, good or evil, are the fruits of Love—right love or wrong—

These sins are all results of Love—excessive or defective, or aimed at the wrong object; and the purgatorial discipline is just the action of the educative Love of God upon willing penitents—straightening, developing, governing, and directing the disordered love that has so marred and stunted the beauty of their souls. The discipline and the humiliation are seen for what they are, and the Divine Love that speaks through them finds a ready and prompt response from souls “happy in the fire,” because of the hope of what it can do for them.

When we pass into the third kingdom, up and up through sphere after sphere of the heavens, each more radiant with the light of Love, we feel ourselves “reflecting, as a mirror, the glory of the Lord, transformed into the same image from glory to glory.” “One star,” indeed, “differeth from another star in glory.” There is higher and lower in the abode of bliss, in the “many mansions” of the Father’s House. Dante questions one whom he meets in the lower sphere—Piccarda—on earth a playmate of his childhood. “Are you happy? Are you content? Have you no wish to be placed higher still?” Her answer enunciates the basal principle of heaven—“Brother, the quality of our love stilleth our will and maketh us long only for what we have, and giveth us no other thirst.... In His Will is our peace”—

Here Love rules imperially, and the image of God’s Will is stamped in glory on the souls of those who, “with unveiled face,” are granted to feast upon the vision of His glory. Pure in heart, their whole being is full of light. And so, too, the poet, when at last he looked upon God, found his own will and desire moving in perfect harmony with that “Love that moves the sun and the other stars.”

So a great lover of Dante, the late Bishop Boyd-Carpenter, summoned up the teaching of the Paradiso: “Wouldst thou enter into God’s Kingdom, O pilgrim of earth? then love. Wouldst thou share the sweet activities of its citizens? then love. Wouldst thou know Him who rules over them and all? then love. For love opens the Kingdom of Heaven, and love makes the joyousness of its happy services, and none can know the heart of God save through love; for God is love.”[23]

Is it not meet that we should thank God this year for the sublime poet who has drawn for us so splendid a picture of the glory of Love “penetrating the whole universe”; who has shown us in Love the one motive force in the world, the one constructive principle? Was there ever a time when the world needed this teaching more than it does to-day? A true doctrine, if ever there was one. If God is Love, then Love is the only principle of life. “He that abideth in love, abideth in God, and God abideth in him.”[24] Real love—not selfish, sensual passion, not sentimental sweetness, not unwise and poisonous indulgence; but love, wise, strong, straight, and pure, like the love of God; love patient, self-forgetful, self-giving, like the love of Jesus Christ; love illuminating, invigorating, recreative, like that of the Holy Ghost. If we could but “reflect” in life and character the “glory” of the Lord!... There is no glory but love.

We must descend from the ethereal splendour of Dante’s Paradiso into the hard realities of workaday life, even as Peter, John, and James came down from the Mount of Transfiguration to face the shouting, wrangling crowd and the convulsions of the epileptic boy. But though the radiance seems to fade, the glory is still with us, for it is the unfailing Love of Him Who promised to be with us “all the days.” Love, then, accompanied them down from the height, unlocked the prison house of afflicted souls, and solved the problems of sin-stricken humanity. And Love, and Love alone, can do the same to-day.

Let us face our bewildering problems with confidence, knowing that the secret of life is ours. Love, the only constructive principle, the only ultimately victorious power. Our enemies in the late war sounded their own doom when they promulgated a gospel of hate. Hate can never build up, only destroy. Alas! they sowed the seeds of hatred outside the sphere where armies clash, and the devil’s doctrine of class-hatred has been disseminated far and wide. If only the eyes of those concerned might be opened to see the mad futility of hate! There is one force at work in the world that can teach this, that can heal the bleeding wounds of society, untie the knots of the industrial and social and international tangle—the force of Christian Love—yours and mine—a love like that of Him Who came not to be served, but to serve and to give His life as ransom for many; a love that brought Him to die for a world yet steeped in rebellion and sin, and moved Him to lay upon His disciples the injunction “Bless them that curse you.” No merely human organisation for philanthropic succour or for peace; not even a League of Nations, even though, thank God, its power and capacity at last be recognised with a gift of solemn responsibility; nothing but the steady action of that “love of God” which His grace sheds into Christian hearts, leavening and inspiring such movements, such organisations, can hope for final success. But Love, after all, sits enthroned above the water floods, and abideth king for ever. There is no limit to our opportunity for blessing this poor world alike by prayer and by action—blessing our own immediate circle, our civic and Church life, blessing our country, our Empire, and the world’s fellowship of Nations—if but our wills are moving in one motion with His—