This baseness may be so great as to
precipitate him to the lowest point of being; but he shall climb
thence through a series of births best fitted to free him from his
evil propensities. Restored to the probationary state, he may fall
again; but, though this should occur again and again

3 Sketch of British Bardism, prefixed to Owen's translation of the
Heroic Elegies of Llywarch Hen.

4 Herbert, Essay on the Neo Druidic Heresy in Britannia.

5 Poems, Lyric and Pastoral, by Edward Williams, vol. ii. notes,
pp. 194-256.

for a million of ages, the path to happiness still remains open,
and he shall at last infallibly arrive at his preordained
felicity, and fall nevermore. In the states superior to humanity,
the soul recovers and retains the entire recollection of its
former lives.

We will quote a few illustrative triads. There are three necessary
purposes of metempsychosis: to collect the materials and
properties of every nature; to collect the knowledge of every
thing; to collect power towards removing whatever is pernicious.
The knowledge of three things will subdue and destroy evil:
knowledge of its cause, its nature, and its operation. Three
things continually dwindle away: the Dark, the False, the Dead.
Three things continually increase: Light, Truth, Life.

These will prevail, and finally absorb every thing else. The soul
is an inconceivably minute particle of the most refined matter,
endowed with indestructible life, at the dissolution of one body
passing, according to its merits, into a higher or lower stage of
existence, where it expands itself into that form which its
acquired propensities necessarily give it, or into that animal in
which such propensities naturally reside. The ultimate states of
happiness are ceaselessly undergoing the most delightful
renovations, without which, indeed, no finite being could endure
the tedium of eternity. These are not, like the death of the lower
states, accompanied by a suspension of memory and of conscious
identity. All the innumerable modes of existence, after being
cleansed from every evil, will forever remain as beautiful
varieties in the creation, and will be equally esteemed, equally
happy, equally fathered by the Creator. The successive occupation
of these modes of existence by the celestial inhabitants of the
Circle of Felicity will be one of the ways of varying what would
otherwise be the intolerable monotony of eternity. The creation is
yet in its infan