THIRD TERRACE.--On reaching the third terrace where Anger is purged, Dante sees examples of meekness and forgiveness in vision. From the black, pungent, and tormenting smoke which envelopes the souls of the once wrathful, who now call upon the Lamb of God for peace and mercy, the Lombard Marco reconciles Free Will with stellar influence, and ascribes the evil condition of Italy and the world to the neglect of law, the confusion of the spiritual and temporal power, and the papal usurpation of imperial rights (_Purg._ xvi.). In this terrace Dante again partakes of the pains of the penitent souls. As the sun is setting, he issues from the dark mist. A most significant passage on the power of the imagination to form images not derived from the senses (xvii. 13-18) introduces the visions of Anger’s punishment, from which the poet is roused by the dazzling splendour of the Angel of Peace or Meekness, who fans away the third P and shows the way up: “Blessed are the peacemakers who are without evil wrath.” FOURTH TERRACE.--The stars are appearing as they reach the fourth terrace, where souls are purged from Sloth. We saw that, in the _Inferno_, the Aristotelian division of things to be morally shunned was discussed, and the ethical structure of the first canticle expounded, in the circle intermediate between Incontinence and Malice (_Inf._ xi.); so, in the _Purgatorio_, a compulsory pause in the terrace intermediate between sins of spirit and sins of flesh is selected by Virgil for his great discourse upon Love, on which is based the moral system of the second realm (_Purg._ xvii. 91-139, xviii. 13-75). It is practically a sermon on the text of Jacopone da Todi, _Ordena questo amore_, _tu che m’ami_, “Set this love in order, thou that lovest me”; since in rational beings disordered love produces the seven capital vices. Pride, Envy, Anger are regarded as distorted love; Sloth as defective love; Avarice, Gluttony, Luxury as excessive love. Love is the golden net whereby God draws back to Himself all creatures that He has made, whether inanimate, sensitive, or rational--by the tendencies or inclinations He has given them to make them seek the end for which they are ordered and disposed, according to the Eternal Law. Rational beings alone have Free Will, by which man merits or demerits from the Divine Justice, according as he inclines to good or evil loves. Love’s tendency to good is the precious material upon which Free Will acts like the craftsman’s hand, to fashion a satyr’s mask or a crucifix. At the end of this discourse, the slothful rush by at full speed in the moonlight, so full of longing to lose no time through too little love, that the Abbot of San Zeno cannot stop while he answers Virgil’s question; those in front cry out examples of alacrity in Mary and Caesar; those behind chant Sloth’s punishment in the chosen people of the Old Testament and the Trojan ancestors of the Romans.