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The Ninth Lesson: Metempsychosis.847
“It seems to me, a firm and well-grounded faith in the doctrine of Christian
metempsychosis might help to regenerate the world. For it would be a faith
not hedged around with many of the difficulties and objections which beset
other forms of doctrine, and it offers distinct and pungent motives for trying
to lead a more Christian life, and for loving and helping our brother-man.”—
Prof. Francis Bowen.
“The doctrine of Metempsychosis may almost claim to be a natural or
innate belief in the human mind, if we may judge from its wide diffusion
among the nations of the earth, and its prevalence throughout the historical
ages.”—Prof. Francis Bowen.
“When Christianity first swept over Europe, the inner thought of its
leaders was deeply tinctured with this truth. The Church tried ineffectually
to eradicate it, but in various sects it kept sprouting forth beyond the time
of Erigina and Bonaventura, its mediaeval advocates. Every great intuitional
soul, as Paracelsus, Boehme, and Swedenborg, has adhered to it. The
Italian luminaries, Giordano Bruno and Campanella, embraced it. The best
of German philosophy is enriched by it. In Schopenhauer, Lessing, Hegel,
Leibnitz, Herder, and Fichte, the younger, it is earnestly advocated. The
anthropological systems of Kant and Schelling furnish points of contact
with it. The younger Helmont, in De Revolutione Animarum, adduces in two
hundred problems all the arguments which may be urged in favor of the
return of souls into human bodies according to Jewish ideas. Of English
thinkers, the Cambridge Platonists defended it with much learning and
acuteness, most conspicuously Henry More; and in Cudsworth and Hume
it ranks as the most rational theory of immortality. Glanvil’s Lux Orientalis
devotes a curious treatise to it. It captivated the minds of Fourier and Leroux.
Andre Pezzani’s book on The Plurality of the Soul’s Lives works out the system
on the Roman Catholic idea of expiation.”—E. D. Walker, in “Re-Incarnation,
a Study of Forgotten Truth.”
And in the latter part of the Nineteenth Century, and this the early part
of the Twentieth Century, the general public has been made familiar with