back into existence certain
souls he knew to be naturally suited to his purpose. This is
distinctly pointed out in the passage from the apostle St. Jude,
which, if we accept the meaning that first offers itself to the mind,
would seem positively to imply that certain souls had undergone a
sentence of eternal reprobation: 'For there are certain men crept in
unawares, who were before of old ordained to this condemnation,
turning the grace of our God into lasciviousness....'

"And so there falls away and disappears the greatest difficulty in the
doctrine of grace, which consisted in explaining how it came about
that God made some men pitiful and others hard-hearted, without there
being in him either justice or acceptance of persons; showing pity,
says St. Augustine, only by grace that was unmerited, and hardening
hearts only by judgment that was always just; since evidently
according to this theory it is not (as Origen has already said) apart
from previous merit that some are formed for vessels of honour, and
others for vessels of shame and wrath. That harsh sentence pronounced
upon Judas by the Bishop of Hippon, which so grievously scandalised
most of the Catholic theologians, although only the confirmation of
the quotation from St. Jude, viz., that the wretched man had been
predestined to shed the Saviour's blood, will seem to be a very just
one in the sense that God causes that already lost soul to be born
again, that demon, as Jesus Christ called him, for the very purpose of
perpetrating the hateful crime.

"Consequently the most sublime mysteries of religion, the most
wonderful facts regarding the destiny of the soul, find their natural
explanation in a clear understanding of this doctrine of
metempsychosis, however strange and extraordinary it may at first
appear. What more striking proof can be asked for, what stronger and
more convincing reason than such agreement, concerning matter wherein
all positive proof will always, humanly speaking, be impossible? A
doctrine which meets all the facts of the case so accurately, which
explains, without difficulty, all the phenomena of our existence in
this world, can, of necessity, be nothing else than true."

Jean Reynaud expresses himself in these terms in _Terre el Ciel_:

"How glorious the light that would be cast on the present order of
things on earth by a knowledge of our former existences! And yet, not
only is our memory helpless regarding the times that preceded b