“The poem consists of three parts—Hell, Purgatory, and Paradise. Each part is divided into thirty-three cantos, in allusion to the years of the Saviour’s life; for although the Hell contains thirty-four, the first canto is merely introductory. In the form of the verse (triple rhyme) we may find an emblem of the Trinity, and in the three divisions of the threefold state of man, sin, grace, and beatitude.… Lapse through sin, mediation, and redemption—these are the subjects of the three parts of the poem; or, otherwise stated, intellectual conviction of the result of sin, typified in Virgil; … moral conversion after repentance, by divine grace, typified in Beatrice; reconciliation with God, and actual, blinding vision of him—‘The pure in heart shall see God.’… The poem is also, in a very intimate sense, an apotheosis of woman.… Nothing is more wonderful than the power of absorption and assimilation in this man, who could take up into himself the world that then was, and reproduce it with such cosmopolitan truth, to human nature and to his own individuality as to reduce all contemporary history to a mere comment on his vision. We protest, therefore, against the parochial criticism which would degrade Dante to a mere partisan; which sees in him a Luther before his time, and would clap the _bonnet rouge_ upon his heavenly muse.” Dante proved himself a reformer of the most aggressive kind. The difference between him and Luther was that Dante endeavored to reform men by means of the church; Luther endeavored to destroy the church rather than reform himself. Evils existed within the church, as a part of society, during the periods of both. Dante helped to correct them as a conservative; Luther chose, as a radical, to tear the edifice down. Unlike the temple of Philistia, the church stood, and the Samson of the sixteenth century fell beneath the ruins of a single column.