““Before we can hope to understand the Fathers, or rightly to estimate the force of the testimony they bear to Universalism, we must try to place ourselves mentally where they stood. 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, and always liable to, 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 abominab le 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, -a fact to be kept in mind in reading these pages. 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.)””
