he fate of Greece and Rome, whose art and
thought it vainly strove to imitate. Underlying this trouble in their
hearts is the assumption to which Plato and certain of his sect have
leanings, that within the Divine there is as it were a treasury of
souls from which individual essences are sped hither, to dwell within
each mortal body immediately on its birth.

Now in an earlier age than the age of Berengarius and St. Victor, there
arose within Alexandria one whose thought in its range, in the sweep of
its orbit, was perhaps the widest and most distant amongst the children
of men. In the most remarkable and sublime of his six _Enneads_,
another theory upon the same subject occurs.[1] The fate of the soul
in passing from its home with the Everlasting is like the fate of a
child which in infancy has been removed from its parents and reared in
a foreign land. The child forgets its country and its kindred as the
soul forgets in the joy of its freedom the felicity it knew when one
with the Divine. But after the lapse of years if the child return
amongst its kindred, at first indeed it shall not know them, but now a
word, now a gesture, or again a trick of the hand, a cadence of the
voice, will come to it like the murmur of forgotten seas by whose
shores it once had dwelt, awaking within it strange memories, and
gradually by the accumulation of these the truth will at last flash in
upon the child--"Behold my father and my brethren!" So the soul of
man, though knowing not whence it came, is by the teachings of Divine
wisdom, and by inspired thinkers, quickened to a remembrance of its
heavenly origin, and its life henceforth becomes an ever-increasing,
ever more vivid memory of the tranced peace, the bliss that it knew
there within the Everlasting.

Let me attempt to apply this thought of the Egyptian mystic to the
problem before us. Disregarding the theory of an infinite series of
successive incarnations from the inexhaustible treasury of the Divine,
permit me to recall the observations made in an earlier lecture on the
contrast between the limited range of man's consciousness, and the
measureless past stretching behind him, the infinite spaces around him.

Judged by the perfect ideal of knowledge, the universe is necessary to
the understanding of a flower, and the dateless past to the
intelligence of the history of a day. But as the beam of light never
severs itself from its fountain, as the faintest ray that falls wi