s. The
result thus arrived at finds effective support in the striking
physical resemblance, spiritual likeness, and similarity of
mission frequently seen between persons in one age and those in a
former age. Columbus was the modern Jason sailing after the Golden
Fleece of a New World. Glancing along the portrait gallery of some
ancient family, one is sometimes startled to observe a face,
extinct for several generations, suddenly confronting him again
with all its features in some distant descendant. A peculiarity of
conformation, a remarkable trait of character, suppressed for a
century, all at once starts into vivid prominence in a remote
branch of the lineage, and men say, pointing back to the ancestor,
"He has revived once more." Seeing Elisha do the same things that
his departed master had done before him, the people exclaimed,
"The spirit of Elijah is upon him." Beholding in John the Baptist
one going before him in the spirit of that expected prophet, Jesus
said, "If ye are able to receive it, this is he." Some of the
later Rabbins assert many entertaining things concerning the
repeated births of the most distinguished personages in their
national history. Abel was born again in Seth; Cain, in that
Egyptian whom Moses slew; Abiram, in Ahithophel; and Adam, having
already reappeared once in David, will live again in the Messiah.
The performance by an eminent man of some great labor which had
been done in an earlier age in like manner by a kindred spirit
evokes in the imagination an apparition of the return of the dead
to repeat his old work.

Fourthly, there are certain familiar psychological experiences
which serve to suggest and to support the theory of transmigration,
and which are themselves in return explained by such a surmise.

Thinking upon some unwonted subject, often a dim impression
arises in the mind, fastens upon us, and we cannot help
feeling, that somewhere, long ago, we have had these reflections
before. Learning a fact, meeting a face, for the first time, we
are puzzled with an obscure assurance that it is not the first
time. Travelling in foreign lands, we are ever and anon haunted by
a sense of familiarity with the views, urging us to conclude that
surely we have more than once trodden those fields and gazed on
those scenes; and from hoary mountain, trickling rill, and vesper
bell, meanwhile, mystic tones of strange memorial music seem to
sigh, in remembered accents, through the soul's plainti