For us the underworld is not believed to be a bare cavity, nor some sewer of the world under the open sky, but a vastness in the pit of the earth and in its depths, a hidden profundity in its innermost parts; since we read that Christ spent the three days of his death in the heart of the earth, that is, in the inmost and internal recess, covered by the earth itself and shut within it, and built over still lower abysses. But if Christ, God because also man, dead according to the Scriptures and buried according to the same, also satisfied this law, fulfilling the form of human death in the underworld, and did not ascend into the heights of heaven before he descended into the depths of the earth,⁠a so that the patriarchs and prophets there could share in him—you have reason both to believe the region of the underworld subterranean and to push aside those who, proudly enough, do not think the souls of the faithful worthy of the underworld: servants above their lord and disciples above their master, scorning, if you please, to receive in Abraham's bosom the comfort of awaiting the resurrection. But Christ went to the underworld, they say, so that we should not go: otherwise what difference is there between heathen and Christians, if the prison is the same for the dead? How then will the soul breathe out to heaven, with Christ still sitting there at the right hand of the Father, God's command not yet heard through the archangel's trumpet, those whom the Lord's coming finds in the world not yet caught up to meet Him in the air, with those who have died in Christ, who will rise first? Heaven is open to no one while the earth is still intact, not to say shut. For the kingdoms of heaven will be unlocked with the end of the world. But will our sleep be in the aether with Plato's boy-lovers, or in the air with Arius, or around the moon with the Endymions of the Stoics? No, you say, in paradise, to which even then the patriarchs and prophets, as the train of the Lord's resurrection, migrated from the underworld. And how is it that the region of paradise revealed to John in the Spirit, which lies under the altar, shows no other souls in it besides those of the martyrs? How did Perpetua, the bravest martyr, on the day of her passion, in the revelation of paradise, see only her fellow martyrs there, unless because the sword that guards the gate of paradise yields to none but those who have died in Christ, not in Adam? A new death for God, an extraordinary one for Christ, is received into another and private lodging. Recognize, then, the difference between heathen and believer in death, if you fall for God, as the Paraclete urges, not in soft fevers and in beds but in martyrdoms, if you take up your cross and follow the Lord, as He Himself commanded. The whole key of paradise is your blood. You also have a little book of ours on paradise, in which we established that every soul is set apart in the underworld until the day of the Lord.