still unreclaimed, then it is
permanently remanded to the furnace of hell. At last, when all the
celestial souls seized by the princes of darkness have returned to
God, save those just mentioned, this world will be burned. Then
the children

27 Irenaus, Adv. Herres., lib. i. cap. 22.

28 Account of the Gnostic Sects, in Moshelm's Comm., II. Century,
sect. 65.

29 Lardner, Hist. of Heretics, ch. xviii. sect. 9.

30 Baur, Das Manichaische Religionssystem.

of God will lead a life of everlasting blessedness with him in
their native land of light; the prince of evil, with his fiends,
will exist wretchedly in their original realm of darkness. Then
all those souls whose salvation is hopeless shall be drawn out of
hell and be placed as a cordon of watchmen and a phalanx of
soldiers entirely around the world of darkness, to guard its
frontiers forever and to see that its miserable inhabitants never
again come forth to invade the kingdom of light.31

The Christian after Christ's own pattern, trusting that when the
soul left the body it would find a home in some other realm of
God's universe where its experience would be according to its
deserts, capacity, and fittedness, sought to do the Father's will
in the present, and for the future committed himself in faith and
love to the Father's disposal. The apostolic Christian, conceiving
that Christ would soon return to raise the dead and reward his
own, eagerly looked for the arrival of that day, and strove that
he might be among the saints who, delivered or exempt from the
Hadean imprisonment, should reign with the triumphant Messiah on
earth and accompany him back to heaven. The patristic Christian,
looking forward to the divided under world where all the dead must
spend the interval from their decease to the general resurrection,
shuddered at the thought of Gehenna, and wrestled and prayed that
his tarrying might be in Paradise until Christ should summon his
chosen ones, justified from the great tribunal, to the Father's
presence. The Manichaan Christian, believing the soul to be
imprisoned in matter by demons who fought against God in a
previous life, struggled, by fasting, thought, prayer, and
penance, to rescue the spirit from its fleshly entanglements, from
all worldly snares and illusions, that it might be freed from the
necessity of any further abode in a material body, and, on the
dissolution of its present tabernacle, might soar to its native
light in the blis