he heavenly army, under an apostate leader, having
rebelled, were defeated, and sentenced to a chained bodily life.
Our whole race were transported at once from their native shores
in the sky to the convict land of this world. Sometimes the
descent was attributed to the fresh fault of each individual, and
was thought to be constantly happening. A soul tainted with impure
desire, drawn downwards by corrupt material gravitation, hovering
over the fumes of matter, inhaling the effluvia of vice, grew
infected with carnal longings and contagions, became fouled and
clogged with gross vapors and steams, and finally fell into a body
and pursued the life fitted to it below. A clear human child is a
shining seraph from heaven sunk thus low. Men are degraded
cherubim.

"Our birth is but a sleep and a forgetting:
The soul that rises with us, our life's star,
Hath had elsewhere its setting,
And cometh from afar."

The theory of the pre existence of the soul merely removes the
mystery one stage further back, and there leaves the problem of
our origin as hopelessly obscure as before. It is sufficiently
refuted by the open fact that it is absolutely destitute of
scientific basis. The explanation of its wide prevalence as a
belief is furnished by two considerations. First, there were old
authoritative sages and poets who loved to speculate and dream,
and who published their speculations and dreams to reign over the
subject fancies of credulous mankind. Secondly, the conception was
intrinsically harmonious, and bore a charm to fascinate the
imagination and the heart. The fragmentary visions, broken
snatches, mystic strains, incongruous thoughts, fading gleams,
with which imperfectrecollection comes laden from our childish
years and our nightly dreams, are referred by self pleasing fancy
to some earlier and nobler existence. We solve the mysteries of
experience by calling them the veiled vestiges of a bright life
departed, pathetic waifs drifted to these intellectual shores over
the surge of feeling from the wrecked orb of an anterior
existence. It gratifies our pride to think the soul "a star
travelled stranger," a disguised prince, who has passingly
alighted on this globe in his eternal wanderings. The gorgeous
glimpses of truth and beauty here vouchsafed to genius, the
wondrous strains of feeling that haunt the soul in tender hours,
are feeble reminiscences of the prerogatives we enjoyed in those
eons when we trod the planets tha