INSPIRATION FROM ABOVE

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 votary 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 * * * 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 caprice of a master of 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!