elieved that bodily death was inflicted as a
punishment for sin;7 Pelagius, that it was the result of a natural
law. The extensive, various learning, massive, penetrating mind,
and remorseless logical consistency, of Augustine, enabled him to
gather up the loose, floating theological elements and notions of
the time, and generalize them into a complete system, in striking
harmony, indeed, with the general character and drift of patristic
thought, but carried out more fully in its details and applied
more unflinchingly in its principles than had been done before,
and therefore in some of its dogmas outstripping the current
convictions of his contemporaries. His dogma of election was too
revolting and immoral ever to win universal assent; and few could
have the heart to unite with him in stigmatizing the whole human
race in their natural state as "one damned batch and mass of
perdition!" (conspersio damnata, massa perditionis.) With these
hints, we are ready to advance to the general patristic scheme of
eschatology. The exceptional variations and heresies will be
referred to afterwards.

First, in regard to the natural state of men under the law, from
the time of Adam's sin to the time of Christ's suffering, their
moral condition and destination, no one can deny that the Fathers
commonly supposed that the dissolution of the body and the descent
of the soul to the under world were a penalty brought on all men
through the sin of the first man. Wherever the lengthening line of
human generations wandered, the trail of the serpent, stamp of
depravity, was on them, sealing them as Death's and marking them
for the Hadean prison. This was the indiscriminate and the
inevitable doom. There is no need of citing proofs of this
statement, as it is well known that the writings of the Fathers
are thronged both with indirect implications and with explicit
avowals of it.

Secondly, they thought that Christ came from heaven to redeem men
from their lost state and subterranean bondage and to guide them
to heaven. Augustine, and perhaps some others, maintained that he
came merely to effectuate the salvation of a foreordained few; but
undoubtedly the common belief was that he came to redeem all who
would conform to certain conditions which he proposed and made
feasible. The important question here is, What did the Fathers
suppose the essence of Christ's redemptive work to be? and how, in
their estimation, did he achieve that work? Was it