ch the goal!"

Paracelsus, like every Initiate, was acquainted with it, and Jacob
Boehme, the "nursling of the Nirmanakayas,"[224] knew that it was a law
of Nature.

Giordano Bruno--also a great Soul--quotes from Ovid's _Metamorphoses_,
Book 15, Line 156, &c., as follows:

"O mortals! chilled by dreams of icy death,
Whom air-blown bubbles of a poet's breath,
Darkness and Styx in error's gulph have hurl'd,
With fabled terrors of a fabled world;
Think not, whene'er material forms expire,
Consumed by wasting age or funeral fire,
Aught else can die: souls, spurning death's decay,
Freed from their old, new tenements of clay
Forthwith assume, and wake to life again.
... All is change,
Nought perishes" ...

_Orger's translation_[225]

Campanella, the Dominican monk, was sent into exile on account of his
belief in the successive returns of the soul to earth.

The Younger Helmont, in his turn, was attacked by the inquisition for
leaching this doctrine in his _De Revolutione Animarum_, in which he
brings forward, in two hundred problems, all the arguments; that make
reincarnation necessary.

Cudworth and Dr. Henry More, the Platonists of Cambridge, were
faithful believers in Palingenesis; whilst Joseph Glanvill, in _Lux
Orientalis_, finds that there are "Seven Pillars" on which
Pre-existence rests.

Dr. Edward Beecher, in _The Conflict of Ages_ and _The Concord of
Ages_, as well as Julius Muller, the well-known German theologian, in
_The Christian Doctrine of Sin_, warmly uphold it.

Schelling acknowledges it in his _Dissertation on Metempsychosis_.

Leibnitz, in his _Monadology_, and more especially his _Theodicy_,
witnessed to his belief in this doctrine. Had he dared to speak out
his thoughts openly, he would more effectively have advocated his
"Optimism," by the teachings of evolution and rebirths, than by all
the other arguments he advanced.

Chevalier Ramsey, in _The Philosophical Principles of Natural and
Revealed Religion_, writes:

"The holy oracles always represent Paradise as our native country, and
our present life as an exile. How can we be said to have been banished
from a place in which we never were? This argument alone would suffice
to convince us of pre-existence, if the prejudice of infancy inspired
by the schoolmen had not accustomed us to look upon these expressions
as metaphorical, and to believe, contrary to Scripture and