Ages before, beneath those very skies that smiled so sweetly over
her,--amid the bloom of lemon and citron, and the perfume of jasmine and
rose, the gentlest of old Italian souls had dreamed and wondered what
might be the unknown future of the dead, and, learning his lesson from
the glorious skies and gorgeous shores which witnessed how magnificent a
Being had given existence to man, had recorded his hopes of man's future
in the words--_Aut beatus, aut nihil_; but, singular to tell, the
religion which brought with it all human tenderness and pities,--the
hospital for the sick, the refuge for the orphan, the enfranchisement
of the slave,--this religion brought also the news of the eternal,
hopeless, living torture of the great majority of mankind, past and
present. Tender spirits, like those of Dante, carried this awful mystery
as a secret and unexplained anguish; saints wrestled with God and
wept over it; but still the awful fact remained, spite of Church and
sacrament, that the gospel was in effect, to the majority of the human
race, not the glad tidings of salvation, but the sentence of immitigable
doom.
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