The Hell of Dante.
In the Thirteenth Century a great Italian poet, the immortal Dante, produced a wonderful work, "La Divina Comedia" ("The Divine Comedy"). In one part of the poem, the author represents himself as passing through Hades or Hell. In the first circle of the infernal depths—a region called "Limbo", which a footnote in my copy of the poem describes as a place "containing the souls of unbaptized children and of those virtuous men and women who lived before the birth of our Savior"—he meets some of the noble characters whom the Apostle Parley mentions as inhabiting the Spirit World, and the guide says to him:
—"Inquirest thou not what spirits
Are these, which thou beholdest? Ere thou pass
Farther, I would thou know, that these of sin
Were blameless; and if aught they merited,
It profits not, since baptism was not theirs,
The portal to thy faith. If they before
The Gospel lived, they served not God aright;
And among such am I. For these defects
And for no other evil, we are lost;
Only so far afflicted, that we live
Desiring without hope."—Hell, Canto IV, Lines 29-39.
And this was all that Thirteenth Century theology could say for such men as Homer, Virgil, Plato, Aristotle and others, the best and brightest spirits of their times!