quities of Mexico, vol. viii. p. 220.

3 Bartlett, Personal Narrative of Explorations in Texas, New
Mexico, &c., ch. xxx.

to spare the living whom accident should throw within their
reach.4 Similar superstitions, but more elaborately developed, are
rife among many tribes of African negroes.5 It was inculcated in
the early Christian centuries by the Gnostics and the Manichaans;
also by Origen and several other influential Fathers. In the
Middle Ages the sect of the Cathari, the Bogomiles, the famous
scholastics Scotus Erigena and Bonaventura, as well as numerous
less distinguished authors, advocated it. And in modern times it
has been earnestly received by Lessing and Fourier, and is not
without its open defenders to day, as we can attest from our own
knowledge, even in the prosaic and enlightened circles of European
and American society.

There have been two methods of explaining the origin of the dogma
of transmigration. First, it has been regarded as a retribution,
the sequel to sin in a pre existent state:

"All that flesh doth cover,
Souls of source sublime,
Are but slaves sold over
To the Master Time
To work out their ransom
For the ancient crime."

With the ancient Egyptians the doctrine was developed in
connection with the conception of a revolt and battle among the
gods in some dim and disastrous epoch of the past eternity, when
the defeated deities were thrust out of heaven and shut up in
fleshly prison bodies. So man is a fallen spirit, heaven his
fatherland, this life a penance, sometimes necessarily repeated in
order to be effectual.6 The pre existence of the soul, whether
taught by Pythagoras, sung by Empedocles, dreamed by Fludd, or
contended for by Beecher, is the principal foundation of the
belief in the metempsychosis. But, secondly, the transmigration of
souls has been considered as the means of their progressive
ascent. The soul begins its conscious course at the bottom of the
scale of being, and, gradually rising through birth after birth,
climbs along a discriminated series of improvements in endless
aspiration. Here the scientific adaptation and moral intent are
thought to lead only upwards, insect travelling to man, man
soaring to God; but by sin the natural order and working of means
are inverted, and the series of births lead downward, until
expiation and merit restore the primal adjustment and direction.

The idea of a metempsychosis, or soul wandering, as the Germans
call it, h