ises more fruitful. Thus you see how all things are renewed by
corruption and reformed by dying.... How, then, could you imagine that
man, the lord of all these dying and reviving things, should himself
die for ever?"

After such a clear and noble profession of faith, we may well wonder
if it were the same man who, in _De Anima_, could have both refuted
and pitilessly ridiculed the idea of rebirth, and denied the
separation of the soul from the body as well as the influence of the
former upon the latter. We prefer to believe that we are dealing with
two writers, or else that some literary forger, anxious to create a
diversion, deliberately made Tertullian responsible for this strange
contradiction.

Another reason for the difficulty in unravelling the tangled skein of
the religious and philosophical teachings prevalent in the early
centuries of Christianity is the lack of precision in the language of
the writers, the loss of the key to the special vocabulary they used,
and the veils which writers who possessed some degree of initiation,
deliberately threw over teachings which could only be given to the
masses in general terms.

There is one very important point to consider; and this is that in the
earlier centuries, outside the circles of initiation, there was not
that precision which the present-day teaching of theosophy has given
to the doctrine of Reincarnation; this latter, in the mind of the
people, became confused with the doctrine of Pre-existence, which
affirms that the soul exists before coming into the present body, and
will exist in other bodies after leaving this one. This confusion has
continued up to the present time, and we find schools of spiritualism
in England and America, as well as in other countries, teaching that
existence on earth has been preceded and will be followed by a great
number of existences on the invisible planes.

In reality, this is the doctrine of Rebirths, though there is nothing
precise about the teaching. Whether the soul has a single physical
body, or takes several in succession, it is none the less continually
evolving as it passes into material vehicles, however subtle the
matter be; the difference is, therefore, insignificant, unless we wish
to enter into details of the process involved, as was the case in the
West in the early centuries of Christianity.

Did the Fathers of the Church teach Pre-existence? There can be no
doubt on this point. In a letter to St. Anastasius