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]
Again and again, as we pass with Dante through the circles of Hell, we feel that his yearning pity for the lost, racking his very soul and flinging him senseless to the ground for misery, shows an awakening spirit which could not long exist in human hearts without teaching them that God's redeeming pity is greater and more patient than their own. So, too, when Francesca and Paolo, touched by Dante's pitying sympathy, exclaim, 'Oh, thou gracious being, if we were dear to God, how would we pray for thee!'[47] who can help feeling that Dante was not far from the thought that all souls are dear to God?
Meanwhile, how strong that faith which could lift up all this weight of mystery and woe, and still believe in the Highest Wisdom and the Primal Love! Only the man who knew the holiness of human life to the full as well as he knew its infamy, only the man who had seen Purgatory and Heaven, and who had actually felt the love of God, could know that with all its mystery and misery the universe was made not only by the Divine Power, but by the Supreme Wisdom and the Primal Love, could weave this Trinity of Power, Wisdom, Love, into the Unity of the all-sustaining God, who made both Heaven and Hell.
And we still have to face the same insoluble mystery. The darker shade is indeed lifted from the picture upon which we gaze; we have no eternal Hell, no eternity of sin, to reckon with; but to us too comes the question, 'Can the world with all its sin and misery be built indeed upon the Primal Love?' And our answer too must be the answer not of knowledge but of faith. Only by making ourselves God's fellow workers till we _feel_ that the Divine Power and the Primal Love are one, can we gain a faith that will sustain the mystery it cannot solve. Alas! how often our weaker faith fails in its lighter task, how often do we speak of sin and misery as though they were discoveries of yesterday that had brought new trials to our faith, unknown before; how often do we feel it hard to say even of earth what Dante in the might of his unshaken faith could say of Hell itself--that it is made by Power, Wisdom, Love!