he constant reappearance of
that faith in all parts of the world and its permanent hold on certain
great nations....

"The advocates of the resurrection should not confine their attention
to the repellent or ludicrous aspects of metempsychosis, ... but do
justice to its claim and charm." (_A Critical History of the Doctrine
of a Future Life_.)

Professor Francis Bowen, of Harvard University, writes in the
_Princetown Review_ for May, 1881, when dealing with the subject of
_Christian Metempsychosis_:

"Our life upon earth is rightly held to be a discipline and a
preparation for a higher and eternal life hereafter. But if limited to
the duration of a single mortal body, it is so brief as to seem hardly
sufficient for so great a purpose.... Why may not the probation of the
soul be continued or repeated through a long series of successive
generations, the same personality animating, one after another, an
indefinite number of tenements of flesh, and carrying forward into
each the training it has received, the character it has formed, the
temper and dispositions it has indulged, in the stage of existence
immediately preceding?...

"Every human being thus dwells successively in many bodies, even
during one short life.[232] If every birth were an act of absolute
creation, the introduction to life of an entirely new creature, we
might reasonably ask why different souls are so variously constituted
at the outset.... One child seems a perverse goblin, while another has
the early promise of a Cowley or a Pascal.... The birthplace of one is
in Central Africa, and of another in the heart of civilised and
Christian Europe. Where lingers eternal justice then? How can such
frightful inequalities be made to appear consistent with the infinite
wisdom and goodness of God?...

"If metempsychosis is included in the scheme of the divine government
of the world, this difficulty disappears altogether. Considered from
this point of view, everyone is born into the state which he has
fairly earned by his own previous history.... We submit with enforced
resignation to the stern decree; ... that the iniquities of the
fathers shall be visited upon the children even to the third and
fourth generation. But no one can complain of the dispositions and
endowments which he has inherited, so to speak, from himself, that is,
from his former self in a previous stage of existence.

"And it matters not, so far as the justice of the sentence is
concerne