an
souls back-slidings and falls were so frequent that some of them, thus
enfeebled, might find it to their advantage[194] to become incarnate,
at times, in highly-developed animal bodies. But that was always an
exception, and the exception has long ago become an impossibility.

We think these explanations, along with those given in other portions
of this work, will throw as much light as is permitted publicly on the
subject of metempsychosis--a subject frequently discussed and one that
has hitherto been so obscure. Such illumination as is here given is
due to the teachings of theosophy.

THE EARLY CHRISTIAN CHURCH.

The documents to which we have access, dealing with the philosophical
and religious history of Christianity in the first few centuries of
our era, are so questionable, that we can place but faint reliance
upon them, if we would really become acquainted with the thought of
that period. We have already seen that the number of spurious or
counterfeit productions was so great that a strange kind of sorting
out, or selection, took place at the first Council of Nicaea, resulting
in the choice of four so-called canonical Gospels. It is evident, too,
that the copyists, compilers, and translators of the period were
anxious, above all else, to make facts and opinions agree with their
preconceived ideas and personal sympathies or likings. Each author
worked _pro domo sua_, emphasising whatever fitted in with his
personal views and carefully concealing what was calculated to weaken
them; so that at the present time the only clues we have to guide us
out of the labyrinth consist of the brief opinions expressed by a few
historians, here and there, on whose honesty reliance may be placed.

In the present chapter, for instance, it is no easy matter to unravel
the Truth from out of these tangled threads of personal opinions. Some
believe that the early Christians and the Fathers of the Church were
reincarnationists; others say they were not; the texts, we are in
possession of, contradict one another. Thus, whereas Saint Jerome
brings against Origen the reproach of having in his book _De
Principiis_ taught that, in certain cases, the transmigration of human
souls into the bodies of animals, was possible--as, indeed, seems to
be the case--certain writers deny that he ever said anything on the
subject. These contradictory affirmations are easy to explain, once we
know that Ruffinus, when translating into Latin the Greek