ions multiply on another side,
when one considers salvation and damnation: for it appears strange that,
even in the great future of eternity, evil should have the advantage over
good, under the supreme authority of him who is the sovereign good, since
there will be many that are called and few that are chosen or are saved. It
is true that one sees from some lines of Prudentius (Hymn. ante Somnum),

_Idem tamen benignus_
_Ultor retundit iram,_
_Paucosque non piorum_
_Patitur perire in aevum,_

that divers men believed in his time that the number of those wicked enough
to be damned would be very small. To some indeed it seems that men believed
at that time in a sphere between Hell and Paradise; that this same
Prudentius speaks as if he were satisfied with this sphere; that St.
Gregory of Nyssa also inclines in that direction, and that St. Jerome leans
towards the opinion according whereunto all Christians would finally be
taken into grace. A saying of St. Paul which he himself gives out as
mysterious, stating that all Israel will be saved, has provided much food
for reflexion. Sundry pious persons, learned also, but daring, have revived
the opinion of Origen, who maintains that good will predominate in due
time, in all and everywhere, and that all rational creatures, even the bad
angels, will become at last holy and blessed. The book of the eternal
Gospel, published lately in German and supported by a great and learned
work entitled [Greek: 'Apokatastasis panton], has caused much stir over
this great paradox. M. le Clerc also has ingeniously pleaded the cause of
the Origenists, but without declaring himself for them.

[133]
18. There is a man of wit who, pushing my principle of harmony even to
arbitrary suppositions that I in no wise approve, has created for himself a
theology well-nigh astronomical. He believes that the present confusion in
this world below began when the Presiding Angel of the globe of the earth,
which was still a sun (that is, a star that was fixed and luminous of
itself) committed a sin with some lesser angels of his department, perhaps
rising inopportunely against an angel of a greater sun; that
simultaneously, by the Pre-established Harmony of the Realms of Nature and
of Grace, and consequently by natural causes occurring at the appointed
time, our globe was covered with stains, rendered opaque and driven from
its place