ns.

Then away in Egypt comes St. Clement of Alexandria, born about fifty
years after St. John's death. I have been greatly interested in some
little touches in his chapter on the descent into the world of the
dead. He asserts as the direct teaching of Scripture that our Lord
preached the Gospel to the dead, but he thinks that the souls of the
Apostles must have taken up the same task when they died, and that it
was not merely to Jews and saints, but to heathen as well--as was only
fair, he says, since they had no chance of knowing. Don't you like
that honest appeal of his "as was only fair"?

St. Clement's great disciple, Origen, comes next. His evidence comes
in curiously. A famous infidel named Celsus, knowing of this
wide-spread creed of the Church about the preaching in Hades, laughs at
the Christians. "I suppose your Master when He failed to persuade the
living had to try and persuade the dead?" Origen meets the question
{60} straight out: "Whether it please Celsus or no, we of the Church
assert that the soul of our Lord, stript of its body, held converse
with other souls that He might convert those capable of instruction."

Then away in Western Africa, the Church's belief is represented by
another great teacher, Tertullian. In Jerusalem, Cyril the Bishop,
teaches the people in his catechetical lectures this faith of the
Church with a ring of gladness and triumph. He sees Christ not only
amid the souls who had once been disobedient, but also in blessed
intercourse with the strugglers after right who had never seen His face
on earth. He pictures how the holy prophets ran to our Lord, how
Moses, and Abraham, and Isaac, and Jacob, and David, and Samuel, and
John the Baptist, ran to Him with the cry, "Oh, Death, where is thy
sting? Oh, Grave, where is thy victory, for the Conqueror has redeemed
us."

I cannot go on to tell of St. Athanasius and the rest. I have said
enough to show you that in the early ages of the Church--the pure
loving ages--nearest to the Lord and to the Apostles, the Church
rejoiced in the glad belief that Christ went and visited the spirits in
the Unseen who had never seen His face on earth.[1]

Section 3

This was one of the gladdest notes in the whole Gospel harmony of the
early Church for five hundred years, in the purest and most loving
days, the days nearest our Lord and His Apostles. It was a note of
triumph. It told of the tender, thoughtful love of Christ for the
f