Until about the end of the nineteenth century, a man was expected to give his reasons for joining the Catholic Church. To-day a man is really expected to give his reasons for not joining it. This may seem an exaggeration; but I believe it to stand for a subconscious truth in thousands of minds. As for the fundamental reasons for a man doing it, there are only two that are really fundamental. One is that he believes it to be the solid objective truth, which is true whether he likes it or not; and the other that he seeks liberation from his sins. If there be any man for whom these are not the main motives, it is idle to enquire what were his philosophical or historical or emotional reasons for joining the old religion; for he has not joined it at all.

But a preliminary word or two may well be said about the other matter; which may be called the challenge of the Church. I mean that the world has recently become aware of that challenge in a curiously and almost creepy fashion. I am literally one of the least, because one of the latest, of a crowd of converts who have been thinking along the same lines as I. There has been a happy increase in the number of Catholics; but there has also been, if I may so express it, a happy increase in the number of non-Catholics; in the sense of conscious non-Catholics.

We had been talking about the recent exhibitions and everybody agreed that it was a melancholy thing to see how men who had begun as real and sincere artists had, for obvious reasons, become purveyors of popular pictures. Another spoke of the work of a gifted and restless politician who was known to be in his spare moments a slashing painter of landscape. From this we came by a natural transition to amateurs generally and their ways.

Alison, the poet, contended strongly for the essential superiority of the amateur as a sort of aristocrat who was entitled to special consideration because he worked from inspiration while others worked by routine. Look at the daily articles, the weekly reviews, the annual novels. Look at the painters. ‘Look’ he said, ‘at the average production here and abroad, at the Academy, the galleries, the Salons. Routine work without inspiration. Potboilers. Things done, not because they had to be done, but because something must be done. Fellows always at it—starve if they didn’t, I am afraid, some of them. (Alison has a substantial income of his own). How can you have freshness of vision, spontaneity, sincerity the things that make Art vital? How does the fun of the thing come in? No fun at all, drudgery. You know, Howard, what Schiller said about the element of play in Art—a sort of sublime—or at any rate charming—play in which we escape from the trammels of everyday life. . .

It is said that Dante took his revenge upon his enemies by putting them in his Inferno and thus pilloried them for all time. According to Alphonse de Lamartine, for example, ‘le poeme exclusivement toscan du Dante était une espèce de satire vengeresse du poète et de l’homme d’Etat contre les hommes et le partis auxquels il avait voue sa haine.’ Lamartine's shallow Voltairian view is still vaguely held, for a modern writer has recently referred to Dante’s ‘vindictiveness which mars and prevaricates the truth.’ Carlyle, on the other hand, exclaimed, ‘What a paltry notion is that of his Divine Comedy’s being a poor, splenetic, impotent, terrestrial libel; putting those into hell whom he could not be avenged upon on earth ! ‘But the general impression among casual readers of the Commedia is that this was what he actually did.

The purpose, therefore, of this article is to enquire whether there is any evidence of ‘vindictiveness’ in the Inferno.

Now, apart from the crowd of mythological and scriptural and ancient historical personages, there are about sixty-seven persons, mostly contemporaries, mentioned by name or whose identity is undisputed. The supposed ‘vindictiveness,’ of course, could only be shown towards some of these. There are notorious Florentines, like Ciacco, the glutton, and Filippo Argenti, an arrogant and intolerant bully, of whom Boccaccio also tells us a characteristic Decameron story (ix, 8). There are common highway murderers like Rinier de Corneto and Rinier Pazzo. There are prodigals, like Lano of Siena, who in despair committed suicide, and Jacomo da Sant’ Andrea of Padua, who was executed for arson.

The exclusion of secular political questions from the subject matter of our Catholic Reviews, which obtained very largely before the war, was a weakness inherent in the mentality of the Catholic body at that time. It existed because Catholics, as a body, had never emerged from the atmosphere of sufferance; they felt their numerical weakness so strongly that it seemed a dangerous thing to discuss things on which they disagreed. It was a weakness because it hindered the development of political thought among Catholics, who, even if they have absorbed nothing more than the penny Catechism, are better equipped for it than those who have never had the advantage of that training in logic and philosophy. No Catholic should be capable of the mental confusion that so heavily overlays the political discussions of our secular press.

There is, and has been now for some time, every indication that this attitude of timid reserve has broken down. The Church in this country emerged from the war with a very much enhanced prestige, despite misrepresentation of the Papal neutrality. The historic Pastoral Letter of Cardinal Mercier made a deep and abiding impression on the non-Catholic mind. The returning troops brought back memories and impressions which scattered the mists of ignorant Victorian prejudice, and while the social teachings of Pope Leo XIII are slowly reaching the minds of the people, the striking Pastoral Letter of the Cardinal Archbishop of Westminster on social questions, and the courageous intervention of some of the bishops in particular matters,

The baby, new to sky and earth, surrounded by toys and playthings, extracts the keenest pleasure from throwing them about, picking them to bits, thumping them flat, pulling them awry, squeezing them out of shape.

Although this early impulse is not necessarily an evidence of original sin, it does show a twisted instinct which will need correction. That correction comes, partly through parental discipline, partly from a dawning sense in the tiny brain that things are made to be kept and used.

So, somewhere about the age of six or seven, the boy or girl sets greater store by doll or tin soldier, picture book or toy train, even taking means to preserve them from injury, and being worried if they spoil. Thus there emerges in the child consciousness the notion of repair, and an inkling of the part it plays amongst us. Then follows the training of school to drive home the lesson.

We, too, are all at school : tuition flows in upon us continually from all quarters. Some of our teachers we like, some we dislike; but there is a general conspiracy to make us learn. We prefer, I suppose, the indirect method; and, as if to please us (by coating the pill), the parabolic way is that chiefly favoured by the great college of preceptors.

Materials for these parables are continually offering themselves to us. They are bound up with our common tasks. The Banished Duke in As You Like It found ‘tongues in trees, books in the running brooks,’ and so forth.

Bossuet, in his sermon on the Unity of the Church, sees her history movingly prefigured by the march of the Israelites through the wilderness: ‘leaving Egypt and the darkness of idolatry she crosses, in search of the Promised Land, a measureless desert where she finds nothing but fearsome rocks and burning sand; no soil, no cultivation, none of earth’s fruits; a terrifying drought; no bread but such as must be sent down from heaven; no refreshing water but such as must be drawn by a miracle from the heart of a rock; all nature sterile in her regard and nothing good but by grace ... In the horror of this vast solitude, she appears surrounded by enemies, marching always in battle array, never resting but in tents, ever ready to move on and to fight; a stranger, whom nothing can fix. nothing satisfy; who casts a passing glance on all things but will neither stop nor stay, and yet is happy in this state, because of the consolations granted her on her journey, and the glorious and immutable rest which will be the end of her course.’

This comparison was never more pathetically applicable to the Church as a whole than in our day of ‘after-Christians’ ; nor to the Church in any country more than in modern France. For that reason, perhaps, French Catholics have gone very far towards a vivid realisation of the manifold aspects of Catholicism, of its universal appeal, of its touch on life at every point;