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The Spirits In Prison Life After Death By E. H. Plumptee D.D. Dean Of Wells

Others there are, we know, who have found relief in the belief that sooner or later, after, it may be, the lapse of ages numbered beyond human ken, all souls will rest, purified and renewed, in the bosom of the universal Father. 

That the Divine Purpose of Love, which hateth nothing that it has made, and will have all men to be saved and to come to the knowledge of the truth, will not always be frustrated by man's resistance.

That larger hope — call it, if you will, that glorious dream — has never been without its witnesses.

The noblest, loftiest, most loving of the teachers of the ancient Church (I am not afraid to speak thus of Origen) embraced it almost as the anchor of his soul. It was cherished by the theologian Gregory of Nyssa to whom we owe the fullest defence of the Nicene Confession of our faith, and was at least widely spread among the Churches of the East. ……………….

It has had many individual witnesses, some in the high places of the Church, some among her noblest thinkers and most loving hearts. It has been, and is, the creed of the great poets whom we accept as the spokesmen of a nation's thoughts. Traces of its latent influence are to be found in those who shrink from openly avowing it. ……………

These facts, striking as they are, not to be ignored or overlooked, are, of course, no criterion of the truth of the opinion. And in this case the hindrances to the reception of the theory as true are, to say the least, very serious. It dwells with a passionate eagerness exclusively on the loving purpose of God, and turns its eyes from the terrible, inalienable prerogative of man's freedom, by which that purpose may be, and daily is, frustrated.