--"Inquirest thou not what spirits Are these, which thou beholdest? Ere thou pass Farther, I would thou know, that these of sin Were blameless; and if aught they merited, It profits not, since baptism was not theirs, The portal to thy faith. If they before The Gospel lived, they served not God aright; And among such am I. For these defects And for no other evil, we are lost; Only so far afflicted, that we live Desiring without hope."--Hell, Canto IV, Lines 29-39. And this was all that Thirteenth Century theology could say for such men as Homer, Virgil, Plato, Aristotle and others, the best and brightest spirits of their times! According to Their Works. Was it not imperative that the Heavens should again open and God's Word go forth once more upon its mission of justice and mercy? The Gospel of Christ is consistent and reasonable. It does not pre-judge men, nor save nor damn them regardless of merit or demerit. Rewarding all according to their works, it gives to every creature, living or dead, a chance to accept or reject it, before final judgment. Is it not evident that Joseph Smith and "Mormonism" were indeed a necessity at the dawn of the Nineteenth Century, when even the Christian world had lost the knowledge of the true God, proclaiming him either a nonentity incapable of act or utterance, or a monster unmerciful and unjust? Sons of Perdition. God is not trying to damn the world, but to save it. All will be saved except "the sons of perdition", those who have had every opportunity to be saved--yes, saved and exalted. They who have known God, and have "tasted of the powers of the world to come", and then have thrown it all away, trampling upon the Truth as a thing of naught, denying the Holy Ghost, and "crucifying the Lord afresh";--these cannot be saved, for salvation is predicated upon repentance, and such have sinned away the power to repent. This is what makes their case hopeless. But comparatively few go that far. All the rest will be saved, and eventually glorified. Different Degrees of Glory. There are different degrees of glory--a glory of the sun, a glory of the moon, and a glory of the stars. So Paul taught (1 Cor. 15:40-42); and Joseph Smith taught it even more plainly. (Doc. & Cov. 76.) They who inherit celestial glory, of which the sun in the firmament is typical, are they who receive the Gospel in this life, and are valiant for it and endure to the end, giving to God the fulness of their obedience. They who inherit terrestrial glory, which differs from the celestial as the moon differs from the sun, are they who receive not the Gospel here, but afterwards receive it; souls not valiant, and who therefore "win not the crown". The inheritors of telestial glory, typified by the stars, "are they who are thrust down to hell", where they pay their debt to Justice, after which Mercy claims its own, and they are ushered into a light and freedom greater than the finite mind can comprehend.