The name _Universalism_, as connected with Christianity, has been especially notable during the present century. But the principles which it implies were averred by the Christian church in its earliest days. It signifies God's unchanging paternal interest in all his children; an interest insuring his just dealing with them for their obedience or disobedience of his beneficent laws, and their final release from sin, and life in righteousness. Under its present name, Universalism is comparatively recent; its special church history being comprehended in something more than a century. But its principles and doctrines are as old as the Christian records, and are found in the Old Testament teachings. Just as all the sects in Christendom, though belonging to modern times, profess to trace whatever they may deem essential back to the Apostles, so believers in Universalism make the same reference, as one of their number has well stated it: "If we have no business here because we came so late, our neighbors must fall under the same condemnation. In mere assumption we are neither younger nor older than they." The Universalist Church claims the New Testament as the basis of its doctrines. It cites the Gospels, the Apostolic History and the Epistles, Christ, and his first ministers, as authority for its pretensions. After the apostles, its lights appear in the early centuries of the Christian era. Dr. Edward Beecher, in his able work, "The Scriptural Doctrine of Future Retribution," shows that at about the time of Origen, out of the six theological schools in Christendom, four taught Universal Salvation as the faith of the Christian Church,--the one at Cæsarea, the one at Antioch, the one at Alexandria, the one at Edessa. That eminent light of the early church, Origen, who so ably and successfully maintained the claims of Christianity against the abusive attacks of the heathen Celsus, was a Universalist. So was Alexander, bishop of Jerusalem, and Gregory Thaumaturgus, bishop of Neocæsarea; and so were the most distinguished by piety and learning of the masters of the great theological seminary of the early Church, the Catechetical school at Alexandria. Doederlein said that "the more profoundly learned any one was in Christian antiquity, so much more did he cherish and defend the hope that the suffering of the wicked would at some time come to an end."[5] And Hagenbach, commenting on a remark of Augustine, says, "that even that great father of Orthodoxy admitted a relative cessation of damnation." Also, Gieseler affirms, "A belief in the unalienable power of amendment in all intelligent beings, and the limited duration of future punishment, was general in the West, and among the opponents of Origen."[6] Of the very time when the influence of Origen was so great in the Church, and when, there can be no good reason to doubt, the doctrine of universal salvation was held by many, if not the majority of Christians, Mr.