To Dante, Virgil appeared as the _sacer vates_ in every sense of the term. As a poet, he towered above all other masters of the craft with whom Dante was acquainted; the testimony of ages had concurred in pronouncing him to be the repository and the exponent of the wisdom and learning of the ancient world, the only secular wisdom and learning to which the Middle Ages could turn for instruction and guidance. His fourth Eclogue had led the Church to acclaim him as one of those pagan seers to whom, jointly with the Sibyls, a share in the preparation for the Gospel had been committed by Divine appointment, while the sixth Æneid directly associated him with the Sibyls themselves; finally, his great poem expressed the very spirit of that Roman Empire, of which the theory at least constituted the basis and framework of the ecclesiastical and civil polity of Christendom. However, the task which Dante had set himself was nothing less, according to his own affirmation,[49] than to expound the scheme of Divine Providence with respect to ‘man, in so far as by his merit or demerit, by virtue of freewill, he is liable to remunerative or punitive Justice’;[50] and by the moving picture of ‘the condition of souls after death,’[51] ‘to withdraw those living in the present life from the state of misery, and to conduct them unto the state of bliss.’[52] Having no desire to innovate upon the accepted beliefs, but rather to expound them in their utmost completeness, and in accordance with the fulness of knowledge, he naturally, and necessarily, availed himself of the materials preserved in Christian legend and popular tradition. These materials, in great measure, were the product of a fusion in the primitive Church of the speculations of the Hellenistic schools with an abundant heritage of analogous conceptions, which had been bequeathed to it by the earlier dispensation. Long before the Christian era, a gradual process of accretion had been going on within the Jewish Church. In the days of their freedom, the people of Israel had addicted themselves but little to speculations concerning the Otherworld; during the captivity, however, they had come into contact with the richer mythology of the conquering nations, and after the return they fell under the influence of the various schools of philosophy, whose teaching, coloured with a theosophic tinge of continually increasing depth, permeated Syria in common with all other lands in which the Hellenistic culture prevailed. These various influences combined to produce a more spiritual type of religion, and a more elaborate eschatology, than had originally entered into the national faith of Israel.