ll sticking to them." The theory of
development, deriving human souls by an ascension from the lower
stages of rudimentary being, considered as a fanciful hypothesis
or speculative toy, is interesting, and not destitute of plausible
aspects. But, when investigated as a severe thesis, it is found
devoid of proof. It is enough here to say that the most
authoritative voices in science reject it, declaring that, though
there is a development of progress in the plan of nature, from the
more general to the more specific, yet there is no advance from
one type or race to another, no hint that the same individual ever
crosses the guarded boundaries of genus from one rank and kingdom
to another. Whatever progress there may be in the upward process
of natural creation or the stages of life, yet to suppose that the
life powers of insects and brutes survive the dissolution of their
bodies, and, in successive crossings of the death gulf, ascend to
humanity, is a bare assumption. It befits the delirious lips of
Beddoes, who says,

"Had I been born a four legg'd child, methinks I might have found
the steps from dog to man And crept into his nature. Are there not
Those that fall down out of humanity Into the story where the
four legg'd dwell?"

The doctrine that souls have descended from an anterior life on
high may be exhibited in three forms, each animated by a different
motive. The first is the view of some of the Manichean teachers,
that spirits were embodied by a hostile violence and cunning, the
force and fraud of the apostatized Devil. Adam and Eve were angels
sent to observe the doings of Lucifer, the rebel king of matter.
He seized these heavenly spies and encased them in fleshly
prisons. And then, in order to preserve a permanent union of these
celestial natures with matter, he contrived that their race should
be propagated by the sexes. Whenever by the procreative act the
germ body is prepared, a fiend hies from bale, or an angel stoops
from bliss, or a demon darts from his hovering in the air, to
inhabit and rule his growing clay house for a term of earthly
life. The spasm of impregnation thrills in fatal summons to hell
or heaven, and resistlessly drags a spirit into the appointed
receptacle. Shakspeare, whose genius seems to have touched every
shape of thought with adorning phrase, makes Juliet, distracted
with the momentary fancy that Romeo is a murderous villain, cry,

"O Nature! what hadst thou to do in hell
When