s a deposition of materialized souls. At every step
they tread on hosts of degraded souls, destined yet, though now by
sin sunk thus low, to find their way back as redeemed and blessed
spirits to the bosom of the Godhead.

Upon the whole, the metempsychosis may be understood, as to its
inmost meaning and its final issue, to be either a Development, a
Revolution, or a Retribution, a Divine system of development
eternally leading creatures in a graduated ascension from the base
towards the apex of the creation, a perpetual cycle in the order
of nature fixedly recurring by the necessities of a physical fate
unalterable, unavoidable, eternal, a scheme of punishment and
reward exactly fitted to the exigencies of every case, presided
over by a moral Nemesis, and issuing at last in the emancipation
of every purified soul into infinite bliss, when, by the upward
gravitation of spirit, they shall all have been strained through
the successively finer growing filters of the worlds, from the
coarse grained foundation of matter to the lower shore of the
Divine essence.

In seeking to account for the extent and the tenacious grasp of
this antique and stupendous belief, in looking about for the
various suggestions or confirmations of such a dogma, we would
call attention to several considerations, each claiming some
degree of importance. First, among the earliest notions of a
reflecting man is that of the separate existence of the soul after
the dissolution of the body. He instinctively distinguishes the

7 Basnage, Hist. Jews, lib. iv. cap. xxx.: Schroder, Judenthum,
buch ii. kap. iii. Eisenmenger, Entdecktes Judenthum. th. ii. kap.
i.

8 Augustine, De Morlb. Manicha., lib. ii. cap. xvii.: De Hares..
cap. xlvi.: Contra Faustum, lib. xvi. cap. xxviii.

thinking substance he is from the material vestment he wears.
Conscious of an unchanged personal identity beneath the changes
and decays everywhere visible around him, he naturally imagines
that "As billows on the undulating main, That swelling fall and
falling swell again, So on the tide of time inconstant roll The
dying body and the deathless soul."

To one thus meditating, and desiring, as he surely would, to
perceive or devise some explanation of the soul's posthumous
fortunes, the idea could hardly fail to occur that the destiny of
the soul might be to undergo a renewed birth, or a series of
births in new bodies. Such a conception, appearing in a rude state
of culture,