Our inmost hearts recognise the reality of this choice, and the justice and necessity of the award that gives us what we have chosen. That the hard, bitter, self-seeking, impure, mutinous, and treacherous heart should drive away love and peace and joy is the natural, the necessary result of the inmost nature and constitution of things, and our hearts accept it. That self-discipline, gentleness, self-surrender, devotion, generosity, self-denying love, should gather round them light and sweetness, should infuse a fullness of joy into every personal and domestic relation, should give a glory to every material surrounding, and should gain an ever closer access to God, is no artificial arrangement which might with propriety be reversed, it is a part of the eternal and necessary constitution of the universe, and we feel that it ought so to be. There is no joy or blessedness without harmony, there is no harmony without the concurrence of independent forces, there is no such concurrence without self-discipline and self-surrender. But these natural consequences of our moral action are here on earth constantly interfered with and qualified, constantly baulked of their full and legitimate effect. Here we do not get our deserts. The actions of others affect us almost as much as our own, and artificially interpose themselves to screen us from the results of what we are and do ourselves. Hence we constantly fail to perceive the true nature of our choice. Its consequences fall on others; we partially at least evade the Divine Justice, and forget or know not what we are doing, and what are the demands of justice with regard to us. Now Dante, in his three poems, with an incisive keenness of vision and a relentless firmness of touch, that stand alone, strips our life and our principles of action of all these distracting and confusing surroundings, isolates them from all qualifying and artificial palliatives, and shows us what our choice is and where it leads to. In Hell we see the natural and righteous results of sin, recognise the direct consequences, the fitting surroundings of a sinful life, and understand what the sinful choice in its inmost nature is. As surely as our consciences accuse us of the sins that are here punished, so surely do we feel with a start of self-accusing horror, 'This is what I am trying to make the world. This is where we should be lodged if I received what I have given. This is what justice demands that I should have. This is what I deserve. It is what I have chosen.'