VI. The Jews had the best parallel of Plato's

Pha3clrus in the third chapter of Genesis, describing the fall of Adam and Eve. The theological comments upon that popular summary of the origin of sin have always groped after reincarnation, by making all Adam's descendants responsible in him for that act. Many Jewish scholars undertook to fuse Greek phi- losophy with their national religion. The Septuagint translation, made in the third century before Christ, gives evidence of such a purpose in suppressing the strong anthropomorphic terms by which the Old Testament mentioned God. Aristobulus, a Jewish- Greek poet of the second century, writes of Hebrew ideas in Platonic phrases. Similar passages are found in Aristeas and in the second book of the Maccabees. Pythagoreanism was blended with Judaism in the beliefs and practices of the Jewish Therapeutae of Egypt, and their brethren the Essenes of Palestine.
Of the Essenes, Josephus writes : " The opinion ob- tains among them that bodies indeed are corrupted, and the matter of them not permanent, but that souls continue exempt from death forever ; and that ema- nating from the most subtle ether they are unfoldedm bodies as prisons to which they are drawn by some natural spell. But when loosed from the bonds of flesh, as if released from a long captivity, they rejoice and are borne upward."
The most prominent Jewish writer upon this sub- ject is Philo of Alexandria, who lived in the time of Christ, and adapted a popular version of Platonic ideas to the religion of his own people. He turned the Hebrew stories into remarkably deft Platonic al-
REINCARNATION AMONG THE ANCIENTS. 211
legories. His theory of preexistence and rebirths is practically that of his master Plato, as is shown in this extract : " The company of disembodied souls is distributed in various orders. The law of some of them is to enter mortal bodies and after certain pre- scribed periods be again set free. But those possessed of a diviner structure are absolved from all local bonds of earth. Some of these souls choose confine- ment in mortal bodies because they are earthly and corporeally inclined. Others depart, being released again according to supernaturally determined times and seasons. Therefore, all such as are wise, like Moses, are living abroad from home. For the souls of such formerly chose this expatriation from heaven, and through curiosity and the desire of acquiring knowledge they came to dwell abroad in earthly na- ture, and while they dwell in the body they look down on things visible and mortal around them, and urge their way thitherward again whence they came originally: and call that heavenly region in which they live their citizenship, fatherland, but this earthly in which they live, foreign." In choosing between the Mosaic and the Platonic account of the Fall, as to which best expressed the essential truth, although a Jew, he decided for Plato. He considers men as fallen spirits attracted by material desires and thus brought into the body's prison, yet of kin to God and the ideal world. The philosophic life is the means of escape, with the aid of the divine Logos, or Spirit, to the blessed fellowship from which they have fallen. Regeneration is a purification from matter. Philo re- nounced the creed of his fathers in order to reform it, and his influence was profoundly felt for centuries. The origin of the Jewish Cabala is involved in end-
212 REINCARNATION AMONG THE ANCIENTS.
less dispute. Jewish scholars claim that it is prehis- toric. Although a portion of it is held to have been composed in the Middle Ages, it is certain that its teachings had been handed down by tradition from very early times, and that some parts come from the Jewish philosophers of Alexandria and others from the later Neo-Platonists and Gnostics. Preexistence and reincarnation appear here, not in Philo's specula- tive form of it, but in a much simpler and more mat- ter-of-fact character, — affirming that human spirits are again and again born into the world, after long in- tervals, and in entire forgetfulness of their previous experiences. This is not a curse, as in Plato's re- ligions, but a blessing, being the process of purifica- tion by repeated probations. "All the souls," says the Zohar, or Book of Light, "are subject to the trials of transmigration ; and men do not know which are the ways of the Most High in their regard. They do not know how many transformations and mysteri- ous trials they must undergo ; how many souls and spirits come to this world without returning to the palace of the divine king. The souls must reenter the absolute substance whence they have emerged. But to accomplish this end they must develop all the per- fections, the germ of which is planted in them ; and if they have not fulfilled this condition during one life, they must commence another, a third, and so forth, until they have acquired the condition which fits them for reunion with God."
VII.
REINCARNATION IN THE BIBLE.
Out from the heart of nature rolled The burdens of the Bible old.
Emebson.
The more diligently the student works this mine (the Bible), the richer and more abundant he finds the ore ; new light continually beams from this source of heavenly knowledge to direct and illustrate the work of God and the ways of men. — Sib Walteb Scott.
The divine oracles are not so silent in this matter as is imagined. But truly I have so tender a sense of the sacred authority of that holy volume that I dare not be so bold with it as to force it to speak what I think it intends not. Wherefore I would not willingly urge Scrip- ture as a proof of anything, but what I am sure by the whole tenor of it is therein contained. Would I take the liberty to fetch in every- thing for a Scripture evidence that with a little industry a man might make serviceable to his design, I doubt not but I should be able to fill my margent with quotations which should be as much to purpose as have been cited in general Catechisms and Confessions of Faith. . . . And yet I must needs say that there is very fair probability for Pre- existence in the written word of God, as there is in that which is en- graved upon our rational natures. — Glantil, in Lux Orientalis.
VII.
REINCARNATION IN THE BIBLE.
The vitality of the doctrine of Reincarnation does not in the least depend upon a scriptural endorsement of it, but the fact that it is surprisingly conspicuous here is certainly interesting and confirmatory. Every candid Christian student must acknowledge that the revelation of truth is no more confined to the central book of Christendom than sunshine is limited to the Orient. There must be great principles of philosophy, like that of evolution, outside of the Bible ; and yet the most skeptical thinker has to concede that this volume is the richest treasury of wisdom, — the best of which is still unlearned.
Although most Christians are unaware of it, rein- carnation is strongly present in the Bible, chiefly in the form of preexistence. It is not inculcated as a doctrine essential to redemption. Neither is immor- tality. But it is taken for granted, cropping out here and there as a fundamental rock. Some scholars consider it an unimportant oriental speculation which is accidentally entangled into the texture. But the uniform strength and beauty of its hold seem to rank it with the other essential threads of the warp upon which is woven the noblest fabric of religious thought.
216 REINCARNATION IN THE BIBLE.
A sufficient evidence of the Biblical support of pre- existence, and of the consequent wide-spread belief in it among the Jews, is found in Solomon's long refer- ence to it among his Proverbs. The wise king wrote of himself : " The Lord possessed me in the beginning of his way before the works of old. I was set up from everlasting, from the beginning, or ever the earth was. When there were no depths, I was brought forth ; when there were no foundations abounding with water. Before the mountains were settled, before the hills was J brought forth : while as yet he had not made the earth, nor the fields, nor the highest part of the dust of the world. When he prepared the heavens I was there : when he set a compass upon the face of the depth : when he established the clouds above : when he strengthened the foundations of the deep: when he gave to the sea his decree, that the waters should not pass his commandment : when he appointed the foundations of the earth : then I was by him, as one brought up with him : and I was daily his de- light, rejoicing always before him ; rejoicing in the habitable part of the earth ; and my delights were with the sons of men." 1 This passage disposes of the theory of Delitzsch that preexistence in the Bible means simply an existence in the foreknowledge of the creator. Such a mere foreknowledge would not place him previous to the parts of creation which pre- ceded his earthly appearance. And the last two clauses clearly express a prior physical life. The prophets, too, are assured of their pre-natal antiquity. Jeremiah hears Jehovah tell him, " Before I formed thee in the belly I knew thee ; and before thou earnest forth out of the womb I sanctified thee." 2
1 Proverbs viii. 22-31. 2 Jeremiah i. 5.
REINCARNATION IN THE BIBLE. 217
Skipping passages of disputed interpretation in Job and the Psalms which suggest this idea, there is good evidence for it all through the Old Testament, which is universally conceded by commentators, and was always claimed by the Jewish rabbis. The trans- lators have distinguished the revealed form of Deity, as successively recorded in the Hebrew Scriptures, by the word LORD, in capitals, separating this use of the word from other forms, as the preexistent Christ. " The angel of the Lord " and " the angel of Jehovah " are other expressions for the same manifestation of the Highest, which modern theology regards as the second person of the Trinity. Wherever God is said to have appeared as man, to Abraham at Mamre, to Jacob at Peniel, to Joshua at Gilgal, to the three captives in the Babylonian furnace as"a fourth, like to the Son of God," etc., Christian scholarship has maintained this to be the same person who afterward became the son of Mary. The Jews also consider these various appearances to be their promised Christ. After the captivity they held the same view concern- ing all persons. The apocryphal " Wisdom of Sol- omon " teaches unmistakably the preexistence of hu- man souls in Platonic form, although it probably is older than Philo, as when it says (ix. 15), " I was an ingenuous child, and received a good soul ; nay, more, being good, I came into a body undefiled ; " and "the corruptible body presseth down the soul, and the earthly tabernacle weigheth down the mind that museth upon many things." Glimpses of it appear also in " Ecclesiasticus."
The assertion of Josephus that this idea was com- mon among the Pharisees is proven in the Gospels, where members of the Sanhedrin cast the retort at
218 REINCARNATION IN THE BIBLE.
Jesus, " Thou wast altogether born in sins." l The prevalence of this feeling in the judgments of daily life is seen in the question put to Jesus by his disci- ples, " Which did sin, this man or his parents, that he was born blind ? " 2 referring to the two contending popular theories, that of Moses, who taught that the sins of the fathers would descend on the children to the third and fourth generation, and that of reincarna- tion, subsequently adopted, by which a man's discom- forts resulted from his former misconduct. Jesus' reply, " Neither," is no denial of the truth of reincar- nation, for in other passages he definitely affirms it of himself, but merely an indication that he thought this truth had better not be given those listeners then, just as he withheld other verities until the ripe time for utterance. This very expression of preexistence used by the disciples he employs toward the man whom he healed at Bethesda's pool after thirty-eight years of paralysis : " Sin no more, lest a worse thing come unto thee."3 Repeatedly he confirms the pop- ular impression that John the Baptist was a reincar- nation of Elijah. To the throng around him he said : " Among them that are born of women there hath not risen a greater than John the Baptist." " If ye will receive it, this is Elias, which was for to come." 4 That John the Baptist denied his former personality as Elijah is not strange, for no one remembers dis- tinctly his earlier life. Often Jesus refers to his descent from heaven, as when he says, " I came down from heaven, not to do mine own will, but the will of him that sent me ; " 5 and what he means by heaven
1 John ix. 34. 2 John ix. 2. 8 John v. 14.
4 Matt. xi. 14 ; also, Matt. xvii. 12, 13. See Professor Bowen's remarks upon these texts, page 115.
5 John vi. 38.
REINCARNATION IN THE BIBLE. 219
is shown by his words to Nicodemus, " No man hath ascended up to heaven but he that came down from heaven, even the Son of man which is In heaven" 1 The inference is that the heaven in which he for- merly lived was similar to the heaven of that mo- ment, namely earth. Again, Jesus asked his disciples, " Whom say men that I am ? " And his disciples state the popular thought in answering, " Some say Elijah, others Jeremiah, and others one of the old prophets." " But whom say ye that I am ? " Peter, the spokes- man, replies, " Thou art the Christ, the Son of God," and so expresses another phase of the same prevailing idea, for the Christ was also an Old Testament per- sonage. And Jesus approves this response. After Herod had decapitated John the Baptist, the appear- ance of Jesus, also preaching and baptizing, roused in him the apprehension that the prophet he killed had come again in a second life.
Preexistence, the premise necessarily leading to reincarnation, is the keynote of the most spiritual of the Gospels. The initial sentence sounds it, the body of the book often repeats it, and the final climax is strengthened by it. From the proem, " In the be- ginning was the word, and the word was with God," all through the story occur frequent allusions to it : " The word was made flesh " (John i. 14) ; " I am the living bread which came down from Heaven " (vi. 51) ; " Ye shall see the Son of man ascend up where he was before " (vi. 62) ; " Before Abraham was, I am " (viii. 58) ; and finally, " Glorify thou me with the glory which I had with thee before the world was " (xvii. 5) ; " For thou lovedst me before the founda- tion of the world" (xvii. 24). It is always phrased 1 Johniii. 13.
220 REINCARNATION IN THE BIBLE.
in such a form as might be asserted by any one, though the speaker says it only of himself.
What the fourth Gospel dwells upon so fondly, and what is echoed in other New Testament books, — as in Philippians ii. 7, " He took on him the form of a servant," in 2 Cor. viii. 9, " Though he was rich, yet for your sakes he became poor," and in 1 John i. 2, " That eternal Life which was with the Father, and was manifested unto us," — is a thought not limited to the Christ. Precisely the same occurs in the mention of the prophet-baptizer John : " There was a man sent from God" (John.i. 6). The obvious sense of this verse to the Christians nearest its publication appears in the comments upon it by Origen, who says that it impHes the existence of John the Baptist's soul pre- vious to his terrestrial body, and hints at the universal belief in preexistence by adding, " And if the Catholic opinion hold good concerning the soul, as not propa- gated with the body, but existing previously and for various reasons clothed in flesh and blood, this ex- pression, ' sent from God,' will no longer seem ex- traordinary as applied to John." No words could more exactly suit the aspirations of an oriental believer in reincarnation than these in the Apocalypse : " Him that overcometh will I make a pillar in the temple of my God, and he shall go no more out" (Rev. iii. 12).
More important than any separate quotations is the general tone of the Scriptures, which points directly toward reincarnation. They represent the earthly life as a pilgrimage to the heavenly country of spirit- ual union with God. It is our conceit and ignorance alone which deems a single earthly life sufficient to ac- complish that purpose. They teach the sinful nature
REINCARNATION IN THE BIBLE. 221
of all men and their responsibility for their sin, which certainly demands previous lives for the acquisition of that condition, as shown well by Chevalier Ramsay. (See pages 83-87.) St. Paul's idea of the Fall and of God are precisely those of Philo and Origen. The Bible also treats Paradise as the ancient abode of man and his future home, which requires a series of reincarnations as the connecting chain.
VIII.
REINCARNATION IN EARLY CHRISTENDOM.
Our soul having lost its heavenly mansion came down into the earthly body as a strange place. — Philo.
The soul leaving the body becomes that power which it has most developed. Let us fly, then, from here below, and rise to the intel- lectual world, that we may not fall into a purely sensible life, by al- lowing ourselves to follow sensible images ; or into a vegetative life, by abandoning ourselves to the pleasures of physical love and glut- tony : let us rise, I say, to the intellectual world, to intelligence, to God himself. — Plotinus.
The order of things is regulated by the providential government of the whole world ; some powers falling down from a loftier position, others gradually sinking to earth : some falling voluntarily, others being cast down against their will : some undertaking of their own accord the service of stretching out the hand to those who fall, others being compelled to persevere for a long time in the duty which they have undertaken. — Jerome.
All that flesh doth cover
Souls by source sublime Are but slaves sold over
To the master Time, To work out their ransom
For the ancient crime.
VIII.
REINCARNATION IN EARLY CHRISTENDOM.
The first centuries of Christianity found reincarna- tion still the prevailing creed, as in all the previous ages, but with various shades of interpretation. What these different phases of the same central thought were may be gathered from Jerome's catalogue, after the strife between Eastern and Western ideas had been working for some centuries and the present tendency of Europe had asserted itself. Jerome writes : " As to the origin of the soul, I remember the question of the whole church : whether it be fallen from heaven, as Pythagoras and the Platonists and Origen believe ; or be of the proper substance of God, as the Stoics, Mani- chseans and Priscillian heretics of Spain believe ; or whether they are kept in a repository formerly built by God, as some ecclesiastics foolishly believe ; or whether they are daily made by God and sent into bodies according to that which is written in the Gospel : 4 My Father worketh hitherto and I work ; ' or whether by traduction, as Tertullian, Apollinarius, and the greater part of the Westerns believe, i. e., that as body from body so the soul is derived from the soul, subsist- ing by the same condition with animals."
In the form of Gnosticism it so strongly pervaded the early church that the fourth Gospel was specially
226 IN EARLY CHRISTENDOM.
directed against it ; but this Gospel according to John attacked it only by advocating a broader rendering of the same faith. We have seen that Origen refers to preexistenee as the general opinion. Clemens Alex- andrinus (Origen's master) taught it as a divine tradi- tion authorized by St. Paul himself in Romans v. 12, 14, 19. Ruffinus in his letter to Anastasius says that " This opinion was common among the primitive fa- thers." Later, Jerome relates that the doctrine of transmigration was taught as an esoteric one commu- nicated to only a select few. But Nemesius emphati- cally declared that all the Greeks who believed in im- mortality believed also in metempsychosis. Delitzsch says, " It had its advocates as well in the synagogues as in the church."
The Gnostics and Manichseans received it, with much else, from Zoroastrian predecessors. The Neo- Platonists derived it chiefly from a blending of Plato and the Orient. The Church Fathers drew it not only from these sources, but from the Jews and the pioneers of Christianity. Several of them condemn the Persian and Platonic philosophies and yet hold to reincarna- tion in other guises. Aside from all authority, the doctrine seems to have been rooted among the inaugu- rators of our era in its adaptation to their mental needs, as the best explanation of the ways of God and the nature of men.