Soon after this our poet hears one of the spirits of the wrathful, discoursing on the degeneracy of human life and sees in a second series of visions, historic instances of wrath and its punishment. He is awakened from his trance by the shining light and the glad summons of the Angel of meekness, who is at the stair leading to the next terrace.

"This is a spirit divine who in the way
Of going up directs us without asking
And who with his own light himself conceals.

Accord we our feet, to such inviting
Let us make haste to mount ere it grow dark;
For then we could not till the day return."
(XVII, 55.)

Lightened of the third P the poet passes from the circle of the wrathful up the fourth stairway. Here he takes the opportunity to engage Virgil in conversation regarding love as the seed of the capital sins. These sins, it may be remarked in passing, are not always mortal sins, though many Dantian editors make the mistake of so classifying them. It is to be observed that on all the stairways of Purgatory there is a conference between the two poets on things likely to be of interest to Dante, in the matter of his salvation. At the end of the present conference Dante falls into slumber, from which he is aroused by the racing activity of the souls of the slothful, shouting instances of zeal and energy.

Sloth is defined by St. Thomas Aquinas as sadness and torpor in the face of some spiritual good which one has to achieve, and a preacher of our day modernizes that definition to mean, the "don't-care-feeling" in the presence of duty. The sin is unlisted in modern treatises on Ethics, the writers of which see in its symptoms only indications of melancholia, neurasthenia or pellagra. But according to the scholastic classification still followed in this matter by the Catholic Church, sloth is to be considered as a specific vice opposed to the great commandment to love God with our whole heart.

So Dante estimates it in his scheme of punishment, representing the souls crying out in their diligence, "Haste, haste, let no time be lost through little love." These souls are condemned to rush round and round at the topmost speed, those in front proclaiming instances of alacrity, viz., how the Blessed Virgin hastened to the hill country to visit Elizabeth and how Julius Caesar hurried to subdue Lerida. Those in the rear recall examples of sloth, viz., how the Israelites through wandering in the desert lost the Promised Land, and how the Trojans who dallied in Sicily gave themselves up to a life inglorious. Dante's slothful souls are startlingly swift in their action. One of them, the Abbot Zeno giving directions for ascent to Virgil and reprobating the sins of his successors in the monastery is out of hearing as soon as he speaks: "If more be said or if he was silent I know not, so far already had he raced beyond us" (XVIII, 127).

The reader will not fail to note that the terrace of the slothful is the only circle of Purgatory where there is no request for intercessory prayer and that Dante here never speaks to any of those souls. Is that because the poet wishes us to understand that his own sentiment is that they do not deserve to be prayed for who neglected through sloth to pray for themselves and that his own silence in their presence is indicative of his disregard for souls so stained?

To foreshow the sins to be treated on the three upper terraces, where are punished those who yielded to the sins of the body, Dante represents himself as tempted by a Siren. She is described as ugly and repulsive and then becoming, under the gaze of the beholder, fair and alluringly attractive—a description, perhaps, unconsciously reproduced by Pope when he wrote:

"Vice is a monster of so frightful mien
As to be hated needs but to be seen.
Yet seen too oft, familiar with her face
We first endure, then pity, then embrace."