The Destiny of the Soul | Page 7

from
the Pit, the greater portion of mankind, we submit, are much too green
for any plausible assumption of a foregone training in good or evil.
This planet is not their missionary station, nor their Botany Bay, but
their native soil. Or, if we suppose they pre existed at all, we must
rather believe they pre existed as brutes, and have travelled into
humanity by the fish fowl quadruped road with a good deal of the
habitudes and dust of that tramp still 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 thou didst bower the
spirit of a fiend In mortal paradise of such sweet flesh?"
The second method of explaining the descent of souls into this life is by
the supposition that the stable bliss, the uncontrasted peace and
sameness, of the heavenly experience, at last wearies the people of
Paradise, until they seek relief in a fall. The perfect sweetness of
heaven cloys, the utter routine and safety tire, the salient spirits, till
they long for the edge and hazard of earthly exposure, and wander
down to dwell in fleshly bodies and breast the tempest of sin, strife, and
sorrow, so as to give a fresh charm once more to the repose and
exempted joys of the celestial realm. In this way, by a series of
recurring lives below and above, novelty and change with larger
experience and more vivid contentment are secured, the tedium and
satiety of fixed happiness and protection are modified by the relishing
opposition of varied trials of hardship and pain, the insufferable
monotony of immortality broken up and interpolated by epochs of
surprise and tingling dangers of probation.
"Mortals, behold! the very angels quit Their mansions unsusceptible of

change, Amid your dangerous bowers to sit And through your sharp
vicissitudes to range!"
Thus round and round we run through an eternity of lives and deaths.
Surfeited with the unqualified pleasures of heaven, we "straggle down
to this terrene nativity:" When, amid the sour exposures and cruel
storms of the world, we have renewed our appetite for the divine
ambrosia of peace and sweetness, we forsake the body and ascend to
heaven; this constant recurrence illustrating the great truths, that
alternation is the law of destiny, and that variety is the spice of life.
But