"
Then he seems to hesitate again, brings in the Church legend of Trajan
brought back to life by the prayers of Gregory the Great that he might be
converted, and after an interval of fifty lines tells us how Ripheus was
saved:--
"The other one, through grace that from so deep
A fountain wells that never hath the eye
Of any creature reached its primal wave,
Set all his love below on righteousness;
Wherefore from grace to grace did God unclose
His eye to our redemption yet to be,
Whence he believed therein, and suffered not
From that day forth the stench of Paganism,
And he reproved therefor the folk perverse.
Those maidens three, whom at the right hand wheel[246]
Thou didst behold, were unto him for baptism
More than a thousand years before baptizing."
If the reader recall a passage already quoted from the _Convito_,[247] he
will perhaps think with us that the gate of Dante's _Limbo_ is left ajar
even for the ancient philosophers to slip out. The divine judgments are
still inscrutable, and the ways of God past finding out, but faith would
seem to have led Dante at last to a more merciful solution of his doubt
than he had reached when he wrote the _De Monarchia_. It is always
humanizing to see how the most rigid creed is made to bend before the
kindlier instincts of the heart.
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