Darkness at the Advent

  When our Lord announced his religion this world was in a condition of unutterable corruption, wretchedness and gloom. Slavery, poverty, vice that the pen is unwilling to name, almost universally prevailed, and even religion partook of the general degradation.1 Decadence, depopulation, insecurity of property, person and life, according to Taine, were everywhere. Philosophy taught that it would be better for man never to have been created. In the first century Rome held supreme sway. ² Nations had been destroyed by scores, and the civilized world had lost half of its population by the sword. In the first century forty out of seventy years were years of famine, accompanied by plague and pestilence. There were universal depression and deepest melancholy. When men were thus overcome with the gloom and horror of error and sin, into their night of darkness came the religion of Christ. Its announcements were all of hope and cheer. Its language was, "Come unto me, all ye who labor and are heavy laden and I will give you rest." "Rejoice in the Lord always; again I will say, rejoice." "We rejoice with joy unspeakable and full of glory." Men were invited to accept the tidings of great joy. John, the herald of Jesus, was a recluse, mortifying body and spirit, but Jesus said, "John come neither eating nor drinking, but the Son of Man came eating and drinking." He forbade all anxiety and care among his followers, and exhorted all to be as trustful as are the lilies of the field and the fowls of the air. Says Matthew Arnold, "Christ professed to bring in happiness. All the words that belong to his mission, Gospel, kingdom of God, Savior, grace, peace, living water, bread of life, are overflowing of promise and joy." And his cheerful, joyful religion at once won its way by its messages of peace and tranquillity, and for a while its converts were everywhere characterized by their joyfulness and cheerfulness. Haweis writes: "The three first centuries of the Christian church are almost idyllic in their simplicity, sincerity and purity. There is less admixture of evil, less intrusion of the world, the flesh, and the devil, more simple-hearted goodness, earnestness and reality to be found in the space between Nero and Constantine that in any other three centuries from A.D. 100 to A.D. 1800." ³ De Pressense calls the early era of the church its "blessed childhood, all calmness and simplicity."⁴ Cave, in "Lives of the Fathers," states: "The noblest portion of church history the most considerable age of the church, the years from Eusebius to Basil the Great."

"Sweetness and Light".

   Christianity was everywhere at first, a religion of "sweetness and light." The Greek fathers exemplified all these qualities, and Clement and Origen were ideals of its perfect spirit. But from Augustine downward the Latin reaction, prompted by the tendency of men in all ages to escape the exactions laid upon the soul by thought, and who flee to external authority to avoid the demands of reason, was away from the genius of Christianity, until Augustinianism ripened into Popery, and the beautiful system of the Greek fathers was succeeded by the nightmare of the theology of the medieval centuries, and later of Calvinism and Puritanism.⁵ Had the church followed the prevailing spirit of the ante-Nicene Fathers it would have conserved the best thought of Greece, the divine ideals of Plato, and joined them to the true interpretation of Christianity, and we may venture to declare that it would thus have continued the career of progress that had rendered the first three centuries so marvelous in their character; a progress that would have continued with accelerated speed, and Christendom would have widened its borders and deepened its sway immeasurably. With the prevalence of the Latin language the East and the West grew apart, and the latter, more and more discarding reason, and controlled, by the iron inflexibility of a semi-pagan secular government, gave Roman Catholicism its opportunity.

Oriental Asceticism

   The influence of the ascetic religions of the Asiatic countries, especially Buddhism, contaminated Christianity, resulting later in celibacy, monasteries, convents, hermits, and all the worser elements of Catholicism in the Middle Ages.⁶ At the first contact Christianity absorbed more than it modified, till in the later ages the alien force became supreme. In fact, orientalism was already beginning to mar the beautiful simplicity of Christianity when John wrote his Gospel to counteract it. Schaff, in his "History of the Christian Church," remarks:

   All the earliest forms of (Christian) asceticism (extreme self-denial) appear in the third century.  The first two Christian hermits were not till Paul of Thebes, A.D. 250, and Anthony of Egypt, A.D. 270, appeared. Asceticism was in existence long before Christ. Jews, Nazarites, Essenes, Therapeutæ, Persians, Indians, Buddhists, all originated this Oriental heathenism. The religion of the Chinese, Buddhism, Brahmanism, the religion of Zoroaster and of the Egyptians, more or less leavened Christianity in its earliest stages. So did Greek and Roman paganism with which the apostles and their followers came into direct contact.

   The doctrines of substitutional atonement, resurrection of the body, native depravity, and endless punishment, are not listed in the earliest creeds or formulas.⁷ The earliest Christians (Allen: Christian Thought) taught that man is the image of God, and that the in-dwelling Deity will lead him to holiness.

   In Alexandria, the center of Greek culture and Christian thought, "more thoroughly Greek than Athens it its days of renown," the theological atmosphere was more nearly akin to that of the Universalist church of the present day than to that of any other branch of the Christian church during the last fifteen centuries.⁸

Wonderful Progress of Christianity at First

   The wonderful progress made during the first three centuries by the simple, pure and cheerful faith of early Christianity shows us what its growth might have been made had not the gloomy spirit of Tertullian, reinforced by the "dark shadow of Augustine," transformed it. As early as the beginning of the second century the heathen Pliny, the chief administrator of Bithynia, reported to the emperor that his province was so filled with Christians that the worship of the heathen deities had nearly ceased. And they were not only of the poor and despised, but of all conditions of life--omnis ordinis. Milner thinks that Asia Minor was at this time quite thoroughly evangelized. As early as the close of the Second Century there were not only many converts from the humbler ranks, but "the main strength of Christianity lay in the middle, perhaps in the merchant's classes." Gibbon says the Christians were not one-twentieth part of the Roman Empire, till Constantine gave them the sanction of his authority, but Robertson estimates them at one-fifth of the whole, and in some districts as the majority.⁹ Origen: "Against Celsus" says: "At the present day (A.D. 240) not only rich men, but persons of rank, and delicate and high-born ladies, receive the teachers of Christianity; and the religion of Christ is better known than the teachings of the best philosophers." And Arnobius testifies that Christians included orators, grammarians, persuasive and eloquent speakers and writers, lawyers, physicians, and philosophers. And it was precisely their bright and cheerful views of life and death, of God's universal fatherhood and man's universal brotherhood--the divinity of its ethical principles and the purity of its professors, that account for the wonderful progress of Christianity during the three centuries that followed our Lord's death. The pessimism of the oriental religions; the corruption and folly of the Greek and Roman mythology; the unutterable wickedness of the mass of mankind, and the universal depression of society invited its advance, and gave way before it. Justin Martyr wrote that in his time prayers and thanksgivings were offered in "the name of the Crucified, among every race of men, Greek or barbarian." Tertullian states that all races and tribes, even to farthest Britain, had heard the news of salvation. He declared: "We are but of yesterday, and lo we fill the whole empire--your cities, your islands, your fortresses, your municipalities, your councils, nay even the camp, the tribune, the decory, the palace, the senate, the forum."¹⁰ Chrysostom testifies that "the isles of Britain in the heard of the ocean had been converted."

God's Fatherhood

   The magical, mystical word of the Alexandrian fathers, as of the New Testament, was FATHER. This word, as now, unlocked all mysteries, solved all problems, and explained all the mysteries of time and eternity. Holding God as Father, punishment was held to be remedial, and therefore restorative, and final recovery from sin universal. It was only when the Father was lost sight of in the judge and tyrant, under the destructive reign of Augustinianism, the Deity was hated, and that Catholics transferred to Mary, and later, Protestants gave to Jesus that supreme love that is due alone to the Universal Father. For centuries in Christendom after the Alexandrine form of Christianity had waned, the Fatherhood of God was a lost truth, and most of the worst errors of the modern creeds are due to that single fact, more than to all other causes.

   It was during those happy years more than in any subsequent three centuries, that, as Jerome observed, "the blood of Christ was yet warm in the breasts of Christians." Says the accurate historian, Cave, in his "Primitive Christianity:" "Here he will find a piety active and zealous, shining through the blackest clouds of malice and cruelty; afflicted innocence triumphant, notwithstanding all the powerful or politic attempts of men or devils; a patience unconquerable under the biggest temptations; a charity truly catholic and unlimited; a simplicity and upright carriage in all transactions; a sobriety and temperance remarkable to the admiration of their enemies; and, in short, he will see the divine and holy precepts of the Christian religion drawn down into action, and the most excellent genius and spirit of the Gospel breathing in the hearts and lives of these good old Christians."

Christianity, a Greek Religion

   "Christianity," says Milman, "was almost from the first a Greek religion. Its primal records were all written in Greek language; it was proclaimed with the greatest rapidity and success among nations either of Greek descent, or those which had been Grecized by the conquest of Alexander. In their form of government the Grecian churches were a federation of republics." At the first, art, literature, life, were Greek, cheerful, sunny, serene. The Latin type of character was sullen, gloomy, characterized, says Milman, by "adherence to legal form; severe subordination to authority. The Roman Empire extended over Europe by a universal code, and by subordination to a spiritual Cæsar as absolute as he was in civil obedience. Thus the original simplicity of the Christian system was entirely subverted; its pure democracy became a spiritual despotism. The presbyters developed into bishops, the bishop of Rome became pope, and Christendom reflected Rome." But during the first three centuries this change had not taken place. "It is there, therefore, among the Alexandrine fathers that we are to look to find Christianity in its pristine purity. The language, organization, writers, and Scriptures of the church in the first centuries were all Greek. The Gospels were everywhere read in Greek, the commercial and literary language of the Empire. The books were in Greek, and even in Gaul and Rome Greek was the liturgical language. The Octavius of Minucius Felix, and Novatian on the Trinity, were the earliest known works of Latin Christian literature.¹¹

An Impressive Thought

   The Greek Fathers derived their Universalism directly and solely from the Greek Scriptures. Nothing to suggest the doctrine existed in Greek or Latin literature, mythology, or theology; all current thought on matters of eschatology was utterly opposed to any such view of human destiny. And, furthermore, the unutterable wickedness, degradation and woe that filled the world would have inclined the early Christians to the most pessimistic view of the future consistent with the teachings of the religion they had espoused. To know that, in those dreadful times, they derived the divine optimism of universal deliverance from sin and sorrow from the teachings of Christ and his apostles, should predispose every modern to agree with them. On this point Allin, in "Universalism Asserted," eloquently says:

   "The church was born into a world of whose moral rottenness few have or can have any idea. Even the sober historians of the later Roman Empire have their pages tainted with scenes impossible to translate. Lusts the foulest, debauchery to us happily inconceivable, raged on every side. To assert even faintly the final redemption of all this rottenness, whose depths we dare not try to sound, required the firmest faith in the larger hope, as an essential part of the Gospel. But this is not all; in a peculiar sense the church was militant in the early centuries. It was engaged in, at times, a struggle, for life or death, with a relentless persecution. Thus it must have seemed in that age almost an act of treason to the cross to teach that, though dying unrepentant, the bitter persecutor, or the pursuiants of abominable lusts, should yet in the ages to come find salvation. Such considerations help us to see the extreme weight attaching even to the very least expression in the fathers which involves sympathy with the larger hope, especially so when we consider that the idea of mercy was then but little known, and that truth, as we conceive it, was not then esteemed a duty. As the vices of the early centuries were great, so were their punishments cruel. The early fathers wrote when the wild beasts of the arena tore alike the innocent and the guilty, limb from limb, amid the applause even of gently-nurtured women; they wrote when the cross, with its living burden of agony, was a common sight, and evoked no protest. They wrote when every minister of justice was a torturer, and almost every criminal court a petty inquisition; when every household of the better class, even among Christians, swarmed with slaves liable to torture, to scourging, to mutilation, at the whim of a master or the frown of a mistress. Let all these facts be fully weighed, and a conviction arises irresistibly, that, in such an age, no idea of Universalism could have originated unless inspired from above. If, now, when criminals are shielded from suffering with almost morbid care, men, the best of men, think with very little concern of the unutterable woe of the lost, how, I ask, could Universalism have arisen of itself in an age like that of the fathers? Consider further. The larger hope is not, we are informed, in the Bible; it is not, we know, in the heart of man naturally; still less was it there in days such as those we have described, when mercy was unknown, when the dearest interest of the church forbade its avowal. But it is found in many, very many, ancient fathers, and often, in the very broadest form, embracing every fallen spirit. Where, then, did they find it? Whence did they import this idea? Can we doubt that the fathers could only have drawn it, as their writings testify, from the Bible itself?"

Testimony of the Catacombs

   An illuminating side-light is cast on the opinions of the early Christians by the inscriptions and emblems on the monuments in the Roman Catacombs.¹² It is well known that from the end of the First to the end of the Fourth Century the early Christians buried their dead, probably with the knowledge and consent of the pagan authorities, in subterranean galleries excavated in the soft rock (tufa) that underlies Rome. These ancient cemeteries were first uncovered A.D. 1578. Already sixty excavations have been made extending five hundred and eighty-seven miles. More than six, some estimates say eight, million bodies are known to have been buried between A.D. 72 and A.D. 410. Eleven thousand epitaphs and inscriptions have been found; few dates are between A.D. 72 and 100; the most are from A.D. 150 to A.D. 410. The galleries are from three to five feet wide and eight feet high, and the niches for bodies are five tiers deep, one above another, each silent tenant in a separate cell. At the entrance of each cell is a tile or slab of marble, once securely cemented and inscribed with name, epitaph, or emblem. ¹³ Haweis beautifully says in his "Conquering Cross:" "The public life of the early Christian was persecution above ground; his private life was prayer underground." The emblems and inscriptions are most suggestive. The principal device, scratched on slabs, carved on utensils and rings, and seen almost everywhere, is the Good Shepherd, surrounded by his flock and carrying a lamb. But most striking of all, he is found with a goat on his shoulder; which teaches us that even the wicked were at the early date regarded as the objects of the Savior's concern, after departing from this life.¹³

   Matthew Arnold has preserved this truth in his immortal verse:¹⁴

"He saves the sheep, the goats he doth not save!"
So rang Tertullian's sentence on the side
of that unpitying Phrygian sect which cried,--
"Him can no fount of fresh forgiveness lave,
Whose sins once washed by the baptismal wave!"
So spake the fierce Tertullian. But she sighed,
The infant Church,--of love she felt the tide
Stream on her from her Lord's yet recent grave,
And then she smiled, and in the Catacombs,
With eyes suffused but heart inspired true,
On those walls subterranean, where she hid
Her head in ignominy, death and tombs,
She her Good Shepherd's hasty image drew
And on his shoulders not a lamb, a kid!

   This picture is a "distinct protest" against the un-Christian sentiment then already creeping into the church from Paganism.

   Everywhere in the Catacombs is the anchor, emblem of that hope which separated Christianity from Paganism. Another symbol is the fish, which plays a prominent part in Christian symbolry. It is curious and instructive to account for this symbol. It is used as a written code of Christ. The word is a sort of acrostic of the name and office of our Lord.

Early Funeral Emblems

   The Greek word fish, in capitals (IXOYE) would be a secret cypher that would stand for our Lord's name, when men dared not write or speak it; and the word or the picture of a fish meant to the Christian the name of his Savior; and he wore as a charm a fish cut in ivory, or mother-of-pearl, on his neck living, and bore to his grave to be exhumed centuries after his death an effigy of a fish to signify his faith. These and the vine, the sheep, the dove, the ark, the palm and other emblems in the Catacombs express only hope, faith, cheerful confidence. The horrid inventions of Augustine, the cruel monstrosities of Angelo and Dante, and the abominations of the medieval theology were all unthought of then, and have no hint in the Catacombs.

   Stll more instructive are the inscriptions. As De Rossi observes, the most ancient inscriptions differ from those of Pagans "more by what they do not say than by what they do say." While the Pagans denote the rank or social position of their dead as clarissima femine, or lady of senatorial rank, Christian inscriptions are destitute of all mention of distinctions. Only the name and some expression of endearment and confidence are inscribed. Says Northcote: "They proceed upon the assumption that there is an incessant interchange of kindly offices between this world and the next, between the living and the dead." Mankind is a brotherhood, and not a word can be found to show any thought of the mutilation of the great fraternity, and the consignment of any portion of it to final despair. Such are these among the inscriptions: "Paxtecum, Urania;" "Peace with thee, Urania;" "Semper in D. vivas, dulcis anima;" "Always in God mayest thou live, sweet soul;" "Mayest thou live in the Lord, and pray for us." They had "emigrated," had been "translated," "born into eternity," but not a word is found expressive of doubt or fear, horror and gloom, such as in subsequent generations formed the staple of the literature of death and the grave, and rendered the Christian graveyard, up to the beginning of the seventeenth century, a horrible place. The first Christians regarded the grave as the doorway into a better world, and expressed only hope and trust in their emblems and inscriptions.

   Following are additional examples of epitaphs: "Irene in Pace." "Here lies Marcia put to rest in a dream of peace." "Victorina dormit," "Victoria sleeps;" "Zoticus hic ad dormiendum," "Zoticus laid here to sleep; "Raptus eterne domus," "Snatched home eternally." "In Christ; Alexander is not dead but lives beyond the stars, and his body rests in this tomb." Contrast these with the tone of heathen funeral inscriptions. In general the pagan epitaphs were like that which Sophocles expresses in OEdipus, at Colomus:

"Happiest beyond compare
Never to taste of life;
Happiest in order next,
Being born, with quickest speed
Thither again to turn,
From whence we came."

   "In a Roman monument which I had occasion to publish not long since, a father (Calus Sextus by name,) is represented bidding farewell to his daughter, and two words--'Vale AEternam,' farewell forever--give an expressive utterance to the feeling of blank and hopeless severance with which Greeks and Romans were burdened when the reality of death was before their eyes." (Mariott, p. 186.) Death was a cheerful event in the eyes of the early Christians. It was called birth. Anchors, harps, palms, crowns, surrounded the grave. They discarded lamentations and extravagant grief. The prayers for the dead were thanksgiving for God's goodness. (Schaff, Hist. Christ. Church, Vol. 1. p. 342.) Their language is such as could not have been used by them had they entertained the views that prevailed from the Sixth to the Eighteenth Century, among the majority of Christians; and their remains all testify to the cheerfulness of early Christianity.

Cheerful Faith of the First Christians

   "The fathers of the church live in their voluminous works; the lower orders are only represented by these simple records, from which, with scarcely an exception, sorrow and complaint are banished; the boast of suffering, or an appeal to the revengeful passions is nowhere to be found. One expresses faith, another hope, a third charity. The genius of primitive Christianity--to believe, to love and to suffer--has never been better illustrated. These 'sermons in stones' are addressed to the heart and not to the head--to the feelings rather than to the taste. In all the pictures and scriptures of our Lord's history no reference is ever found to his sufferings or death. No gloomy subjects occur in the cycle of Christian art." (Maitland.) Chrysostom says: "For this cause, too, the place itself is called a cemetery; that you may know that the dead laid there are not dead, but at rest and asleep. For before the coming of Christ death used to be called death, and not only so, but Hades, but after his coming and dying for the life of the world, death came to be called death no longer, but sleep and repose." The word cemeteries, dormitories, shows us that death was regarded as a state of peace and rest, and thus a condition of hope. If fact, "in this favorable world, ¹⁵ now for the first time applied to the tomb, there is manifest a sense of hope and immortality, the result of a new religion. A star had arisen on the borders of the grave, dispelling the horror of darkness which had hitherto reigned there; the prospect beyond was now cleared up, and so dazzling was the view of an 'eternal city sculptured in the sky,' that numbers were found eager to rush through the gate of martyrdom, for the hope of entering its starry portals." ¹⁶ Says Ruskin: "Not a cross as a symbol in the Catacombs. The earliest certain Latin cross is on the tomb of the Empress Galla Placidia, A.D. 451. No picture of the crucifixion till the Ninth Century, nor any portable crucifix till long after. To the early Christians Christ was living, the one agonized hour was lost in the thought of his glory and triumph. The fall of theology and Christian thought dates from the error of dwelling upon his death instead of his life." ¹⁷ Farrar adds: "The symbols of the Catacombs, like every other indication of early teaching, show the glad, bright, loving character of the Christian faith. It was a religion of joy and not of gloom, of life and not of death, of tenderness not of severity. We see in them as in the acts of the apostles, that the keynotes of the music of the Christian life were 'exultation' and 'simplicity.' And how far superior in beauty and significance were these early Christian symbols to the meaninglessness and pagan broken columns and broken rose-buds and skulls and weeping women and inverted torches of our cemeteries. We find in the Catacombs neither the cross of the fifth and sixth centuries nor the crucifixes of the twelfth, nor the torches and martyrdoms of the seventeenth, nor the skeletons of the fifteenth, not the symbols of mourning and death's heads of the eighteenth. Instead of these the symbols of beauty, hope and peace." ¹⁸

Dean Stanley's Testimony

   From A.D. 70, the date of the fall of Jerusalem, to about A.D. 150, there is very little Christian literature. It is only when Justin Martyr, who was executed A.D. 166, that there is any considerable literature of the church. The fathers before Justin are "shadows, formless phantoms, whose writings are uncertain and only partially genuine." Speaking of the scarcity of literature pertaining to those times and the changes experienced by Christianity, says Dean Stanley: "No other change equally momentous has even since affected its features, yet none has ever been so silent and secret. The stream in that most critical moment of its passage from the everlasting hills to the plain below is lost to our view at the very point where we are most anxious to watch it. We may hear its struggles under the overarching rocks; we may catch its spray on the boughs that overlap its course, but the torrent itself we see not or see only by imperfect glimpses. A fragment here, an allegory there; romances of unknown authorship; a handful of letters of which the genuineness of every portion is contested inch by inch; the summary explanation of a Roman magistrate; the pleadings of two or three Christian apologists; customs and opinions in the very act of change; last, but not least, the faded paintings, the broken sculptures, the rude epitaphs in the darkness of the Catacombs--these are the scanty, though attractive materials out of which the likeness of the early church must be produced, as it was working its way, in the literal sense of the word, underground, under camp and palace, under senate and forum."¹⁹

   There were eighty years between Paul's latest epistle and the first of the writings of the Christian fathers. Besides the writings of Tacitus and Pliny, the long haitus is filled only by the emblems and inscriptions of the Catacombs. What an eloquent story they tell of the cheerfulness of primitive Christianity!²⁰

^{Chapter 3--Origin Of Endless Punishment - Contents}

Spirit of the Word - Covenant Eschatology - Introductory Note - New Stuff

¹ Martial, Juvenal, Tacitus, Pliny, Suetonius, and other heathen writers, describe the well-nigh universal depravity and depression of the so-called civilized world. In Corinth the Acrocorinthus was occupied by a temple to the goddess of lust.
² Uhlhorn's Conflict of Christianity and Paganism.
³ Conquering Cross. Forewords.
⁴ Early Years of the Christian Church.
⁵ Allen's Continuity of Christian Thought.
⁶ Milman's Latin Christianity.
⁷ Shedd's History of Christian Doctrine.
⁸ The early Christians never transferred the rigidity of the Jewish Sabbath to Sunday. Both Saturday and Sunday were observed religiously till towards the end of the second centurty--then Sunday alone was kept. Fasting and even kneeling in prayer was forbidden on Sunday with the early Christians. Ancient Christian writers always mean Saturday by the word "Sabbath."
⁹ The Emperor Maximin in one of his edicts says that "Almost all had abandoned the worship of their ancestory for the new faith."
¹⁰ Hesterni summus et vestra omnes implevimus urbes, insulas, castella, municipia, conciliabula, castra ipsa, tribus, decurias, palatium, senatum, forum. Apol. c. XXXVII. Moshein, however, thinks that the "African orator, who is inclined to exaggerate, "rhetoricates" a little here. The primitive Christians exulted at the wonderful progress and diffusion of the Gospel.
¹¹ Milman's Latin Christianity. "The breadth of the best Greek Fathers, such as Origen, or Clement of Alexandria, is a thousand times superior to the dry, harsh narrowness of the Latins." Athanase Coquerel the Younger, First His. Trans. of Christianity, p. 215.
¹² Cutts, Turning Points of Church History
¹³ See DeRossi, Northcote, Withrow, etc., on the Catacombs.
¹⁴ A suggestive thought in this connection is, that our Lord (Matt. 25:33), calls those on his left hand "kidlings," "little kids," a term for tenderness and regard.
¹⁵ Maitland's Church and the Catacombs.
¹⁶ Maitland.
¹⁷ Bible of Amiens.
¹⁸ Lives of the Fathers.
¹⁹ Christian Institutions.
²⁰ Martineau's Hours of Thought, p. 155. "In the cycle of Christian emblems the death of Christ holds no place; it was not till six centuries after his death that artists began to venture upon the representation of Christ crucified. The crucifix dates only from the end of the Seventeenth Century."--Athanase Coqueral

^{Chapter 3--Origin Of Endless Punishment - Contents}

Spirit of the Word - Covenant Eschatology

Introduction
Chapter 1 - The Earliest Creeds
Chapter 2 - Early Christianity-A Cheerful Religion
Chapter 3 - Origin of Endless Punishment
Chapter 4 - Doctrines of Mitigation and Reserve
Chapter 5 - Two Kindred Topics
Chapter 6 - The Apostles' Immediate Successors
Chapter 7 - The Gnostic Sects
Chapter 8 - The Sibylline Oracles
Chapter 9 - Pantaenus and Clement
Chapter 10 - Origen
Chapter 11 - Origen-Continued
Chapter 12 - The Eulogists of Origen
Chapter 13 - A Third Century Group
Chapter 14 - Minor Authorities
Chapter 15 - Gregory Nazianzen
Chapter 16 - Theodore of Mopsuestia and the Nestorians
Chapter 17 - A Notable Family
Chapter 18 - Additional Authorities
Chapter 19 - The Deterioration of Christian Thought
Chapter 20 - Augustine--Deterioration Continued
Chapter 21 - Unsuccessful Attempts to Suppress Universalism
Chapter 22 - The Eclipse of Universalism
Chapter 23 - Summary of Conclusions