Million Book Collection - The Fishers of Men Ministries

312 THE FORMATION OF CHRISTENDOMman, was an absolute contradiction to its belief thatthe soul was a particle of the divine intelligence.These notions run through the whole movement ofGreek thought from Seneca to Plotinus, and akin tothem, one may say their corollary, is a theory of immortality.While the restoration of the Kosmos inman and human society is the good aimed at for thislife, as to anything beyond it is the union with "theDivine " by the return of the spirit freed from matterto that of which it was a portion, and from which itwas severed at its entrance into bodily life. ThePythagorean and Platonic pre-existence and post-existence of the soul, with the doctrine of transmigrationwhich attends upon it, and the obscure andconfused view of retribution hovering over that doctrine,is part and parcel of the Pantheistic conceptionthat the soul is a particle of the divine reason. Such08t-eii8t< UC8 is m>V a living mi of the human bring,perj f the human identitv. Cicero, whplatonising, makes the mind of Scipio speak to hisdescendant as one living indeed an immortal life, buti dentified with the universal Mind, and without anstence of his own. The Stoic raptures of Senecato the future condition of the mind when purifiedfrom contact with matter, amount to a philosophicNirvana. The same thought inspires the proud exclamationof the dying Plotinus above mentioned, that hewas leading back the god that was in him to the godof the universe. Such a notion of the post-existencehe soul offers exactly the same contrast to theChristian doctrine of eternal life as the Primal Beingoffers to the one living God. It is, indeed, but reason-ble that, if the universe is the eternal procession ofone impersonal substance, mind also, though for a