(1) Here we get early Christian utilizations, for purposes of a doctrine concerning the Intermediate State, of sayings and images which dwell directly only upon certain extrinsic consequences of evil-doing, or which, again, describe a future historical and social event,--the Last Day. For already Origen interprets, in his beautiful _Treatise on Prayer_, XXIX, 16, Our Lord’s words as to the debtor: “Thou shalt be cast into prison, thou shalt not come forth from thence, until thou hast paid the uttermost farthing,” Matt, v, 25, 26, as applying to Purgatory. And in his _Contra Celsum_, VII, 13, he already takes, as the Biblical _locus classicus_ for a Purgatory, St. Paul’s words as to how men build, upon the one foundation Christ, either gold, silver, gems, or wood, hay, stubble; and how fire will test each man’s work; and, if the work remain, he shall receive a reward, but if it be burnt, he shall suffer loss and yet he himself shall be saved yet so as by fire, 1 Cor. iii, 10-15. It appears certain, however, that St. Paul is, in this passage, thinking directly of the Last Day, the End of the World, with its accompaniment of physical fire, and as to how far the various human beings, then on earth, will be able to endure the dread stress and testing of that crisis; and he holds that some will be fit to bear it and some will not. Such a destruction of the world by fire appears elsewhere in Palestinian Jewish literature,--in the Book of Enoch and the Testament of Levi; and in the New Testament, in 2 Peter iii, 12: “The heavens being on fire shall be dissolved, the elements shall melt with fervent heat.” Josephus, _Antiquities_, XI, ii, 3, teaches a destruction by fire and another by water. And the Stoics, to whom also Clement and Origen appeal, had gradually modified their first doctrine of a simply cosmological Ekpyrōsis, a renovation of the physical universe by fire, into a moral purification of the earth, occasioned by, and applied to, the sinfulness of man. Thus Seneca has the double, water-and-fire, instrument: “At that time the tide” of the sea “will be borne along free from all measure, for the same reason which will cause the future conflagration. Both occur when it seems fit to God to initiate a better order of things and to have done with the old.… The judgment of mankind being concluded, the primitive order of things will be recalled, and to the earth will be re-given man innocent of crimes.”[266]