The system, as such, had little to do with childhood. It waited for its close, but it pushed back its influence over the line of adolescence, making as early as might be the day when the child should come into conscious relation with the church. Through the family, however, it powerfully affected the condition of childhood, for by its laws and its ritual it was giving religious sanction to the family, even while it was gradually divorcing itself from humanity under plea of a sanctity which was more than human. Its conception of a religious devotedness which was too good for this world, whereby contempt of the body was put in place of redemption of the body, and celibacy made more honorable than marriage, undermined its hold upon the world, which it sought to govern and to furnish with ideals. Inasmuch as this great system dealt with persons in relations which could be exactly defined and formulated, it would be idle to seek in the literature which reflects it for any considerable representation of that period of human life in which the forms are as yet undetermined. Nevertheless, childhood exercises even here its subtle power of recalling men to elemental truths. Dante was the prophet of a spiritual Rome, which he saw in his vision outlined against the background of the existing hierarchy. It would be in vain to search through the Divine Comedy for many references to childhood. As he says himself in the Inferno,— “For this is not a sportive enterprise To speak the universe’s lowest hold, Nor suits a tongue that Pa and Mammy cries.”[27] And the only picture of childhood in that vision is the melancholy one of the horrid sufferings of Count Ugolino and his children in the Tower of Hunger. In the Paradiso there are two passages of interest. Near the close of the twenty-seventh canto, Beatrice, breaking forth into a rapt utterance of the divine all in all, suddenly checks herself as she remembers how the curse of covetousness shuts men out from entrance into the full circle of divine movement, and then, with a swift and melancholy survey of the changes in human life, cries bitterly:— “Faith, Art, and Innocence are found alone With little children; then they scatter fast Before the down across the cheek have grown. There is that lispeth, and doth learn to fast, Who afterward, with tongue untied from May To April, down his throat all meats will cast. There is that, lisping, loveth to obey His mother, and he’ll wish her in the tomb, When sentences unbroken he can say.” Again, in the thirty-second canto, S. Bernard is pointing out the circles of the Rose, and after denoting the degrees of saints before Christ and after, proceeds:—