fore his birth and since his death there have been great poets, great prophets, great reformers; and we are content to ask to which of these groups he belongs, and to what extent and in what way he is superior to his fellows in that group.
But to my mind Dante was great because he claimed and fulfilled a function claimed by no other man before or since his time. He is indeed a great poet and a great mystic, but that which differentiates him from all other men is not his poetry nor his mysticism. Art, theology, politics, are for him means subordinate to one supreme purpose: he sought to be the vicar of God on earth.
Dante was a sincere son of the Church, and for that very reason he was conscious of the enormous decadence of the Papacy. The concept of the Pope as the vicar of Christ was a noble one: had it been conserved in its purity there would have been nothing strange in the lordship which the Pope sought to exercise, by the sheer power of his word, over all the kingdoms of the earth. But the Papacy itself had become earthy, had fed on gold, had sold its right to the spiritual dominion of the entire world that it might gain material dominion over one small portion of the world. It had rendered itself liable to judgment, to condemnation, and had lost thereby its true raison d'être, its mis-
