Many are unable to apprehend the greatness of the "Divine Comedy." Voltaire called the "Inferno" revolting, the "Purgatorio" dull, and the "Paradiso" unreadable. The reason is because they are not rightly attuned for the acceptance of the great truths which the poem teaches, and because they look at it from a wholly mistaken standpoint. If anyone supposes that the "Inferno," for instance, is meant for a burning torture-chamber of endless torments and horrible vivisection, he entirely misses the central meaning of the poem as Dante himself explained it. For he said that it was not so much meant to foreshadow the state of souls after death--although on that subject he accepted, without attempting wholly to shake them off, the horrors which, in theory, formed part of mediæval Catholicism--but rather "man as rendering himself liable by the exercise of free-will to the rewards and punishments of justice." The hell of Dante is the hell of self; the hell of a soul which has not God in all its thoughts; the hell of final impenitence, of sin cursed by the exclusive possession of sin. It is a hell which exists no less in this world than in the next; just as his purgatory reflects the mingled joy and anguish of true repentance, and his heaven is the eternal peace of God, which men can possess here and now, and which the world can neither give nor take away. In other words, hell is not an obscure and material slaughter-house, but the Gehenna of evil deliberately chosen; and heaven is not a pagoda of jewels, but the presence and the light of God. Hence the "Divine Comedy" belongs to all time and to all place. While it supremely sums up the particular form assumed by the religion of the Middle Ages, it contains the eternal elements of all true religion in the life history of a soul, redeemed from sin and error, from lust and wrath and greed, and restored to the right path by the reason and the grace which enable it to see the things that are, and to see them as they are. The "Inferno," as has been said elsewhere, is the history of a soul descending through lower and lower stages of self-will till it sinks at last into those icy depths of Cocytus, wherein the soul is utterly emptied of God, and utterly filled with the loathly emptiness of self; the "Purgatory" is the history of the soul as it is gradually purged from sin and self, by effort and penitence and hope; the "Paradise" is the soul entirely filled with the fulness of God.