And this brings us to another consideration: the eternity of Dante's Hell. Those who know no other line of Dante, know the last verse of the inscription upon the gate of Hell: 'All hope relinquish, ye that enter here.' The whole inscription is as follows: 'Through me the way lies to the doleful city; through me the way lies to eternal pain; through me the way lies 'mongst the people lost. 'Twas justice moved my Lofty Maker; Divine Power made me, Wisdom Supreme and Primal Love. Before me were no things created, save things eternal; and I, too, last eternal. All hope relinquish, ye that enter here.'[44] The gates of Hell reared by the Primal Love! If we believe in the eternity of sin and evil, the eternity of suffering and punishment follows of necessity. To be able to acquiesce in the one, but to shrink from the thought of the other, is sheer weakness. The eternity and hopelessness of Dante's Hell are the necessary corollaries of the impenitence of his sinners. To his mind wisdom and love cannot exist without justice, and justice demands that eternal ill-desert shall reap eternal woe. But how could one who so well knew what an eternal Hell of sin and suffering meant, believe it to be founded on eternal love? Why did not Dante's heart in the very strength of that eternal love rebel against the hideous belief in eternal sin and punishment? I cannot answer the question I have asked. Dante believed in the Church, believed in the theology she taught, and could not have been what he was had he not done so. Had he rejected any of the cardinal beliefs of the Christianity of his age and rebelled against the Church, he might have been the herald of future reformations, but he could never have been the index and interpreter to remotest generations of that mediæval Catholic religion of which his poem is the very soul. Meanwhile note this, that if ever man realised the awful mystery and contradiction involved in the conception of a good God condemning the virtuous heathen to eternal exile, that man was Dante. If ever heart of man was weighed down beneath the load of pity for the damned, that heart was Dante's. The virtuous heathen he places in the first round of Hell; here 'no plaint is to be heard except of sighs, which make the eternal air to tremble;' here, with no other torture than the death of hope without the death of longing, they live in neither joy nor sorrow, eternal exiles from the realms of bliss.[45] Dante, as we shall see hereafter, longed with a passionate thirsty longing to know how the Divine justice could thus condemn the innocent. But his thirst was never slaked. It was and remained an utter mystery to him; and there are few passages of deeper pathos than those in which he remembers that his beloved and honoured guide and master, even Virgil, the very type of human wisdom and excellence, was himself amongst these outcasts.[46]