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reasons, that ceased to be expected. Nevertheless, so strongly is this side of the Mass insisted on that you will find that all our books of devotion exhort the hearer, if he is not prepared for the actual reception of the Eucharist, to make at that part of the Mass the meditations and exercises which are known as a Spiritual Communion-that he may thereby take unto himself, if not the sacramental fulness of the Divine Love, at least so much of the sense and effect of that union with the present God as in his duller spiritual state he may.

The three ideas to which I have now sought to direct your attention are, however, all dominated by the last, which contains in itself the wide and fundamental distinction between the Mass and every other form of the public worship of God. I have called it the realization of the presence of God.

To all who believe in God He must of logical necessity be, in some sense, always present. But when Christ said that "where two or three are gathered together in My name, there am I in the midst of them," He was referring to the evident fact that for the human consciousness there may and must be a special presence of God, on those occasions when His children come before Him. Here, as so often in the Catholic Creed, we come upon the note of human solidarity. God is present to any religious soul; but where the brethren are gathered together-where the collective life of the Christian society is manifested-there He is, so to say, more fully present, and more near. It is good to pray alone, and to lift up the silent worship of the heart; but it is better, it is indeed a duty, to come forth and join with others in a social act of worship, in a common prayer for all the common need. For the Church of Christ is above all things ar organic community, wherein none are isolated, none rejected, none sent empty away. The representative office of the Priest, offering the Mass in the name of all the people, absent as well as present, dead as well as alive, is itself the sign and token of this corporate character. The congregation -each particular èxxλŋoía-is but the representative of all the Church; and to each there comes, as we believe, the real presence of that Lord who has called the Church His bride.

It is not enough that one should know, as an intellectual proposition, that God is here. It is of much more consequence that one should realize it-that His personal nearness should be brought home to one's heart. We may know that a close friend is not far off, but that knowledge has on us a very different effect from the sound of a well-known step, and the hearing of a long-remembered voice. Now the one thing which, above all else, I venture here to claim for the great office of the Catholic Church is, that it brings home to us the vivid, palpable sense of "God with man.”

At this point, however, the subject passes out beyond my reach. I have more than occupied the space of time appointed to me. And I could not hope, even if I delayed you far longer, to bring home to you what is meant in the spiritual experience of the Catholic world by the Sacramental VOL. I.-pt. 2.

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Presence. There are some things which it is not granted to man to utter at least in the ordinary ways of speech.

I will close, therefore, by pointing you for a moment to an entirely different, but not alien, aspect of the great office of the Church.

It has many forms and many uses, but in such a world as we live in there is one great use which should not be forgotten. It may clothe itself in the simplest surroundings, and yet do all its work for men. But in the ancient ritual and the ceremonial tradition there is an opportunity which the Church has always gladly used, of clothing upon it all the glory of architecture and of music, all the wealth of colour and of precious things which the devotion of the servants of God can offer in the highest act of their worship. You know, my friends, what an infinite impulse this very desire to glorify the place and the occasion in which the Lord came to His people, has been to Art in all the Catholic centuries. Until some such religious fervour comes again, your Art will strive but slowly. Do not say: "To what purpose is this waste?" That which in the service of God is used to make more glorious the common worship of the people is one of the best gifts that can be given to God's poor. In many parts of the East End of London, as a Protestant observer lately said, there is no place of light and beauty but the Catholic Church. And what higher work can art and beauty do than that of the handmaid of a religion which is itself the solace and inspiration of the poor? If I could go on to tell you what we know of the human uses which this office serves, I should have much to say of its utility for many kinds of men. But it is to the poor, whom He most loved on earth, that the fullest advantage of His great commemoration comes. You may do much for social conditionsyou may redress much injustice and open many avenues of success; but nothing you can do will compensate those who bear the misery of the world for what they will lose if you deprive them of a living religion, and of that great public act in which all that is hard in human conditions needs must fall away, and in which all that is glorious in human wealth is taken up into the glory of the Divine.

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THE RELIGION OF DANTE.

BY OSCAR BROWNING, M.A.

NOTHING is more remarkable than the manner in which the reputation of Dante has developed with the new growth of national life in the kingdom of Italy. There was a time when, although his name was famous, his works were comparatively unread. Tasso was sung by Venetian gondoliers, and shared with the Promessi Sposi the honour of being an Italian text-book for studious youth. The knowledge of Dante was confined to the Inferno, and in that almost to the two episodes of Francesca da Rimini and Ugolino, the pair of unfortunate lovers who expiated their fault by being borne everlastingly upon a rushing wind; and the father who, murdered by the vengeance of an implacable enemy, fed in his last agony on the bodies of his children, who had died before him.

With the first flush of Italian independence this state of things entirely changed. I was privileged to witness from time to time the marvellous spectacle of the renascence of Italy. I remember Milan before Magenta, and Verona before Custozza; Milan, when any citizen was liable to be roused from his bed, and imprisoned in a fortress without a trial; and Verona, when it was dangerous to speak seriously except in the open fields. I witnessed the rivalry of Cavour and Garibaldi at Turin, and read in the streets of Parma the half-hourly telegrams which announced the entry of the Italian troops into other marches. As soon as the Press was free, it teemed with cheap editions of Dante. They were exposed in every bookshop and kiosque, and were hawked about the streets on trays. The fever spread from Turin to Florence, from Florence to Rome, and from Rome to Naples. Dante was lectured upon to ladies, and taught as a classic in the schools. Undoubtedly this enthusiasm sprang chiefly from political causes. Dante was a Ghibelline—that is, in the great struggle which divided Italy between the party of authority and the party of local independence, he supported the party of authority. He believed in the subordination of the Papacy to the Empire, in the presence of a strong ruler who could quell the discordant rivalries of Italian cities, and educe order out of chaos: above all, he believed in the unity of Italy, that great cause which was then in process of consummation. Dante, in his first canto, prophesies of the coming hero, the greyhound who, disregarding the gain of money and territory, is to drive the wolf of the Papacy from city to city until she returns to the hell from which she sprang. It was a favourite conceit, which has not altogether disappeared, that the greyhound-the Veltrobegan with the two initials of Victor Emmanuel's name, and that the whole

title might run Vittorio Emmanuele, Liberatore, Trionfatere, Re Ottimo (Victor Emmanuel, the Liberator, the Triumpher, the Best of Kings).

But Dante has not been without his revival on the religious side. When the leaders of the Oxford movement were leaving the Church of England, which they believed to be corrupt, for the Church of Rome, which they imagined they could purify, they studied Dante is the source of undefiled religion. In him they found, or thought they found, an orthodoxy unimpeached, a faith founded on reason and knowledge, unembittered by the theological disputes which followed the Reformation, and transfused by passionate love of humanity and truth.

What then are the essential characteristics of the religion of Dante? How does Dante deal with what are the three necessary component parts of all religions-Faith, Hope, and Charity; which last more fitly bears the name of Love? These three virtues-the theological virtues as they are sometimes called-are symbolized by a cross, an anchor, and a heart. The heart is symbolical of Charity or Love, but in medieval Italian sculpture Charity is figured by a woman who has not only her heart but her brain on fire, showing that real love, the true enthusiasm of humanity, must not only inflame the heart with burning zeal, but must set the mind aglow until it disregards the dictates of cool reason. Reason has no place where emotion is the guiding principle. The cross, the symbol of Christianity, represents revealed religion, the dogma which could not be known to us except by a tradition which is apart from and above the effects of human wisdom. There remains the anchor of Hope, that quality which, when the heart and the brain are on fire and the mind is lifted into the region of revealed truth, keeps the soul fixed to a sure and certain anchorage. This was afforded in Dante's case by intellectual knowledge-the knowledge of the world and of the universe, as far as it can be ascertained by human understanding; the realization of the past, the present, and the future of man; the lower life from which he has gradually emerged, the environments which surround and condition his existence, and the destiny which awaits him. Let us, then, study the religion of Dante under these three aspects. Let us consider in turn: of what nature was his love; what was his knowledge of the world and of man; what was the complexion of his faith; and, lastly, how these three qualities were fused together into a harmonious whole, so as to survive to future ages and influence a distant posterity.

Let us first speak of the origin and character of his love. The name of Dante is inseparable from that of Beatrice. Dante was born at Florence, about the middle of May 1265. He first met Beatrice Portinari, at the house of her father, Folco Portinari, on May-day, 1274. In the Vita Nuova ("The Young Life "), which gives an account of this absorbing passion, he tells us: "Already nine times after my birth the heaven of light had returned as it were to the same period, when there appeared to my eyes the glorious lady of my mind, who was by many called Beatrice,

who knew not what to call her. She had already been so long in this life that already in its time the starry heaven had moved toward the east the twelfth part of a degree, so that she appeared to me about the beginning of her ninth year, and I saw her about the end of my ninth year. Her dress on that day was of a most noble nature, a subdued and goodly crimson, girdled and adorned in such sort as best suited with her tender age. At that moment I saw most truly that the spirit of life, which hath its dwelling in the most secret chamber of the heart, began to tremble so violently that the least pulses of my body shook therewith, and in trembling it said these words: Ecce deus fortior me qui veniens dominaritur mihi! 'Behold a god stronger than I am, who in his coming will have lordship over me!' From that time forth I declare that love had lordship over my soul, which was speedily placed at its disposition, and it began to assume over me such authority by the power which my imagination gave it that I was forced to perform all its behests. Love ordered me many times to take occasion to see this youngest of the angels, so that in my boy. hood many a time I went about in search of her, and saw that she had such noble and praiseworthy carriage that certainly there might be used of her the expression of the poet Homer, 'She appeared to be a daughter, not of man, but of God.' And although the image which always abided with me was the boldness at Love to lord it over me, yet it was of such noble power that at no time did it suffer that Love should guide me without the faithful counsel of reason in those things in which such counsel was useful to listen to."

Another story of a contemporary tells us of this marvellous and absorbing love. Dante, when he has related in the fifth canto of the Inferno the punishments of Francesca da Rimini and her lover, says that the tears they shed at the end of their narrative affected him so deeply that he felt his forces fail as if in death, and fell as a dead body falls. A note in the MS. of Monte Cassino, evidently written by some one who knew Dante, says that this experience befell Dante himself, and that one day, unexpectedly meeting Beatrice on the staircase of a house, he fell suddenly to the ground as if he were dead. Dante lost his father when he was ten years old; and his boyhood and youth for the next eight years were spent in severe study. His next memorable meeting with Beatrice was nine years later, when this marvellous lady appeared to him in a dress of dazzling white. She was accompanied by two older ladies, one on each side, and as she passed Dante in the street she turned her eyes to where he stood full of fear, and, of her ineffable courtesy, saluted him so virtuously that all the blessedness of heaven seemed open to Dante's eyes. This was the first time that he ever heard her speak; and the words came to his ears with such sweetness that he went away as if intoxicated with delight. He then retired to a solitary place in his chamber and set himself to think of that most courteous lady; and as he thought, there came upon him a very sweet sleep, in which there appeared to him a marvellous vision. There

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