Another reason for lesser interest manifested in this part of the Divina Commedia is the difficulty and obscurity of the Paradiso. It is not easy reading, because it requires study, repetition, concentration, meditation, qualities absent from the art of reading as it prevails today. If we ever have time to look at a book, the habit of skimming with inattentive rapidity so urges us onward that we find ourselves flitting from page to page, from chapter to chapter, panting and uninstructed. And if we belong to the bookless majority who have no time to read, we rush to the moving picture theatre to get our mental pabulum--often a season's best seller--boiled down, served in rapid-fire order and bolted in the twinkling of an eye. For all such Dante's Paradiso is an intellectual as well as a spiritual impossibility and the poet begs such not to follow him on his voyage to the eternal kingdom. "Oh ye who in some pretty little boat Eager to listen, have been following Behind my ship, that singing sails along, Turn back to look again upon your shores; In losing me, you might yourselves be lost. The sea I sail has never yet been passed. Minerva breathes, and pilots me Apollo, And Muses nine point out to me the Bears. Ye other few, who have the neck uplifted Betimes to th' bread of Angels upon which One liveth here and grows not sated by it, Well may you launch upon the deep salt-sea Your vessel, keeping still my wake before you Upon the water that grows smooth again. Those glorious ones who unto Colchos passed Were not so wonder-struck as you shall be, When Jason they beheld a ploughman made." (II, 1.) The song which Dante sings in the Paradiso is the eternal happiness of man in vision, love and enjoyment united to his Creator. In preparation for this final consummation the poet, as he ascends to the Empyrean, gives a most beautiful epitome of the principal mysteries of religion and of some of the tenets of scholastic philosophy, treating especially the Fall of Man, Predestination, Free Will, the Redemption, the Immortality of the Soul and the theory of Human Knowledge. Allegorically considered, the poem is a veil, under which we see the ideal life of man upon earth, exercising virtue and gaining virtue's rewards. To exhibit man's supreme, happiness in the next life, the Christian poet, insisting that his purpose is the inculcation of truth, both to save and to adorn the soul, must base his theme upon the doctrines of the Church. The definition of some of those dogmas Dante anticipated. All may be summed up in the following statement: