Upon the face of Cato, the guardian of the shore and mountain, so shines the light of the four mystical stars, that he seems illumined with the very light of the sun of Divine Grace (_Purg._ i. 37-39). Cato, “the severest champion of true liberty,” “to kindle the love of liberty in the world, gave proof of how dear he held her by preferring to depart from life a free man, rather than remain alive bereft of liberty” (_Mon._ ii. 5). He was one of those who “saw and believed that this goal of human life is solely rigid virtue” (_Conv._ iv. 6). Thus from Lucan’s _Pharsalia_, Dante has recreated this austere and glorious figure to be the warden of the spiritual kingdom where virtue is made perfect by love and true liberty attained. At sunrise the white-robed and white-winged Angel of Faith brings the ransomed souls over the ocean from the banks of the Tiber, where the redeemed gather, as the lost do upon the shores of Acheron (_Purg._ ii.). The _In exitu Israel_ of their psalm signifies mystically, in Dante’s allegory, the passing of the holy soul from the bondage of this corruption to the liberty of eternal glory (_Epist._ x. 7). His own song of love on the lips of Casella has peculiar fitness at the entrance of the realm of hope and purgation; for, in the eyes of that mystical lady, of whom Love discourses, is the anticipation of Paradise, and yet she is the example of humility--the humility in sign of which Dante has girded himself with a rush. As they turn towards the ascent, the excommunicated draw near, led by Manfred; cut off from the body of the Church by the Pontiff’s curse, they were reunited to its soul by tardy repentance. The episode of Manfred is a counterpart to that of Celestine in the corresponding canto of the _Inferno_. Dante would clearly show the difference of God’s judgment from that of man. The figure of the canonised pope-hermit, whom the world extolled as a perfect type of Christian renunciation, and who died in the odour of sanctity, is contrasted with that of the worldly king who died excommunicate, and whose name was tainted with suspicion of incest and parricide: “Horrible were my sins, but Infinite Goodness has such wide arms that it takes whatever turns to it” (_Purg._ iii. 121-123).