[livius]

The opinion of the Church has always been that people of good will can be saved, but that all are saved through Christ. Preaching the Gospel is the commission of every Christian, but there are people who can’t hear it because it never comes to them, and even people who are incapable of hearing it because they are appalled by the behavior of some people who call themselves Christians.

There is also natural law, which is the basis of our Constitution and was the basis of all Christian legal thinking prior to Luther. Even the pagans can understand it, and it was what early Christian missionaries built on, even in this country, where the Franciscans found what was good in the Indian beliefs and customs and showed them the real meaning of it in Christ.

You think God should just damn them?

[AEMILIUS PAULUS]

I did not say God should damn them and neither you nor any man knows how God is going to deal with the people who lived before Christ or after him and never had an opportunity to hear of him. Jesus did say "I am the way the truth and the light and no man comes to the father except by me." How do YOU deal with that statement?

It is an old problem never answered in the scriptures-the only authoritative statement by the Good Lord. If it is NOT IN THE SCRIPTURE then mankind does not KNOW! What is God going to do with the soul of the Eight year old Athenian boy who died in the plague that swept Athens during the War with Sparta?