ible life of the spiritual sphere
to the visible life here on earth, teaching, as he says, the necessity
of their again having material bodies ere, as saints and men made
'perfect as our Father which is in heaven is perfect,' they once more
enjoy in the angel-world their _former_ blessedness.
"Justin Martyr also speaks of the soul inhabiting the human body more
than once, but thinks as a rule (instanced in the case of John the
Baptist forgetting that he had been Elijah) it is not permitted us to
remember our former experiences of this life while yet again we are in
exile here as strangers and pilgrims in an uncongenial clime away from
our heavenly home.
"Clemens Alexandrinus, and others of the Fathers, refer to
re-incarnation (or transmigration or metempsychosis, as it is called
in the years that are passed of classic times and later now as
_re-birth_) to remind us of the vital truth taught by our Lord in the
words, '_Ye must be born again_.'"
These words, falling from the lips of a man so eminent in the staid
conservative ranks of the Church of England, must attract the
attention of every earnest seeker after the Truth of Christian
Doctrine. If such a man, reared in such an environment, could find
himself able to bear such eloquent testimony to the truth of a
philosophy usually deemed foreign to his accepted creed, what might we
not expect from a Church liberated from the narrow formal bounds of
orthodoxy, and once more free to consider, learn and teach those noble
doctrines originally held and taught by the Early Fathers of the
Church of Christ?
While the majority of modern Christians bitterly oppose the idea that
the doctrine of Metempsychosis ever formed any part of the Christian
Doctrine, and prefer to regard it as a "heathenish" teaching, still
the fact remains that the careful and unprejudiced student will find
indisputable evidence in the writings of the Early Christian Fathers
pointing surely to the conclusion that the doctrine of Metempsychosis
was believed and taught in the Inner Circle of the Early Church.
The doctrine unquestionably formed a part of the Christian Mysteries,
and has faded into comparative obscurity with the decay of
spirituality in the Church, until now the average churchman no longer
holds to it, and in fact regards as barbarous and heathenish that part
of the teachings originally imparted and taught by the Early Fathers
of the Church--the Saints and Leaders.
The Early Christi
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