Introduction
There have been Christian "universalists" -Christians, that is,
who believe that in the end all persons will be saved and joined
to God in Christ- since the earliest centuries of the faith. In
fact, all the historical evidence suggests that the universalist
faction was at its most numerous, at least as a relative ratio
of believers, in the church's first half millennium. Augustine
of Hippo (354-430) referred to such persons as misericordes,
"the merciful-hearted," an epithet that for him apparently had
something of a censorious ring to it ( one, I confess, that is quite
inaudible to me). In the early centuries they were not, for the
most part, an especially eccentric company. They cherished the
same scriptures as other Christians, worshipped in the same
basilicas, lived the same sacramental lives. They even believed
in hell, though not in its eternity; to them, hell was the fire of
purification described by the Apostle Paul in the third chap-
ter of 1 Corinthians, the healing assault of unyielding divine
love upon obdurate souls, one that will save even those who
in this life prove unworthy of heaven by burning away every
last vestige of their wicked deeds. The universalists were not
even necessarily at first a minority among the faithful, at least
not everywhere. The great fourth-century church father Ba-