, Rufinus said that
"this belief was common amongst the early Christian fathers."
Arnobius[197] shows his sympathy with this teaching, and adds that St.
Clement, of Alexandria, "wrote wonderful accounts of metempsychosis";
and afterwards, in other passages of the same book, he appears to
criticise the idea of the plurality of lives. St. Jerome affirms that
"the doctrine of transmigration has been secretly taught from ancient
times to small numbers of people, as a traditional truth which was not
to be divulged."[198] A. Franck quotes this passage on page 184 of his
_Kabbale_; Huet, too, gives it in _Origeniana_.[199] The same Father
proves himself to be a believer in Pre-existence, in his 94th _Letter
to Avitus_, where he agrees with Origen on the subject of the
interpretation of a passage from St. Paul,[200] and says that this
means "that a divine abode and true repose are to be found in Heaven,"
and "that there dwell creatures endowed with reason in a state of
bliss, before coming down to our visible world, before they fall into
the grosser bodies of earth...."

Lactantius, whom St. Jerome called the Christian Cicero, though he
opposed pagan doctrines, maintained that the soul was capable of
immortality and of bodily survival only on the hypothesis that it
existed before the body.[201]

Nemesius, Bishop of Emissa in Syria, stoutly affirmed the doctrine of
Pre-existence, declaring that every Greek who believed in immortality
believed also in the pre-existence of the soul.

St. Augustine said: "Did I not live in another body, or somewhere
else, before entering my mother's womb?"[202]

In his _Treatise, on Dreams_, Synesius states that "philosophy assures
us that our past lives are a direct preparation for future lives...."
When invited by the citizens of Ptolemais to become their bishop, he
at once refused, saying that "he cherished certain opinions of which
they might not approve, as, after mature reflection, they had struck
deep root in his mind. Foremost among these, he mentioned the doctrine
of Pre-existence."

Dr. Henry More, the famous Platonist of the seventeenth century,
quotes Synesius as one of the masters who taught this doctrine,[203]
and Beausobre reports a typical phrase of his,[204] "Father, grant
that my soul may merge into Light and be no more thrust back into the
illusion of earth."

St. Gregory of Nysa says it is absolutely necessary that the soul
should be healed and purified, and if this does