espondences.

The second explanation of the origin of souls is that which says
they come from a previous existence. This is the theory of
imagination, framed in the free and seductive realm of poetic
thought. It is evident that this idea does not propose any
solution of the absolute origination of the soul, but only offers
to account for its appearance on earth. The pre existence of souls
has been most widely affirmed. Nearly the whole world of Oriental
thinkers have always taught it. Many of the Greek philosophers
held it. No small proportion of the early Church Fathers believed
it.1 And it is not without able advocates among the scholars and
thinkers

1 Keil, Opuscula; Be Pre existentia Animarum. Beausobre, Hist. du
Manicheisme, lib. vii. cap. iv.

of our own age. There are two principal forms of this doctrine;
one asserting an ascent of souls from a previous existence below
the rank of man, the other a descent of souls from a higher
sphere. Generation is the true Jacob's ladder, on which souls are
ever ascending or descending. The former statement is virtually
that of the modern theory of development, which argues that the
souls known to us, obtaining their first organic being out of the
ground life of nature, have climbed up through a graduated series
of births, from the merest elementary existence, to the plane of
human nature. A gifted author, Dr. Hedge, has said concerning pre
existence in these two methods of conceiving it, writing in a
half humorous, half serious, vein, "It is to be considered as
expressing rather an exceptional than a universal fact. If here
and there some pure liver, or noble doer, or prophet voice,
suggests the idea of a revenant who, moved with pity for human
kind, and charged with celestial ministries, has condescended to

'Soil his pure ambrosial weeds
With the rank vapors of this sin worn mould,'

or if, on the other hand, the 'superfluity of naughtiness'
displayed by some abnormal felon seems to warrant the supposition
of a visit from the Pit, the greater portion of mankind, we
submit, are much too green for any plausible assumption of a
foregone training in good or evil. This planet is not their
missionary station, nor their Botany Bay, but their native soil.
Or, if we suppose they pre existed at all, we must rather believe
they pre existed as brutes, and have travelled into humanity by
the fish fowl quadruped road with a good deal of the habitudes and
dust of that tramp sti