AN ATTEMPT TO STATE THE CENTRAL THOUGHT OF THE COMEDY APPENDIX. Dante's poem--the true reflection of his mind--is a compact and rounded _whole_ in which all the parts are mutually interdependent. Its digressions are never excrescences, its episodes are never detached from its main purpose, its form is never arbitrary and accidental, but is always the systematic and deliberate expression of its substance. Moreover it is profoundly mediæval and Catholic in conception and spirit. The scholastic theology and science of the Middle Ages and the spiritual institutions of the Catholic Church were no trammels to Dante's thought and aspiration. Under them and amidst them he moved with a perfect sense of freedom, in them he found the embodiment of his loftiest conceptions. Against their abuses his impetuous spirit poured out its lava-stream of burning indignation, but his very passion against those who laid impure hands upon the sacred things of God is the measure of his reverence for their sanctity. If the Catholic poet of the fourteenth century speaks with a voice that can reach the ears and stir the hearts of the Protestant and heretic of the nineteenth, it is not so much because he rose above the special forms and conditions of the faith of his own age as because he went below them and touched the eternal rock upon which they rested. Not by neglecting or making light of the dogmas and institutions of his day, but by piercing to their very heart and revealing their deepest foundations, did he become a poet for all time. The distinction, then, which we are about to draw between the permanent realities of Dante's religion and the passing forms, the temporary conditions of belief, under which it was manifested, is a distinction which did not exist for him. His faith was a garment woven without seam, or, to use his own metaphor, a coin so true in weight and metal, so bright and round, that there was no 'perhaps' to him in its impression.[96] This unwavering certainty alike in principle and in detail, this unfaltering loyalty to the beliefs of his day alike in form and substance, is one of the secrets of Dante's strength. But, again, such compactness and cohesion of belief could not have been attained except by the strict subordination of every article of concrete faith to the great central conceptions of religion, rising out of the very nature and constitution of the devout human soul. And therefore, paradox as it may seem, the very intensity with which Dante embraced beliefs that we have definitely and utterly rejected, is the pledge that we shall find in his teaching the essence of our own religion; and we may turn to the Comedy with the certainty that we shall not only discover here and there passages which will wake an echo in our bosoms, but shall also find at the very heart of it some guiding thought that will be to us as it was to him absolutely true.