The Destiny of the Soul | Page 8

the most common derivation of the present from a previous life is
that which explains the descent as a punishment for sin. In that earlier
and loftier state, souls abused their freedom, and were doomed to
expiate their offences by a banished, imprisoned, and burdensome life
on the earth. "The soul," Plutarch writes, "has removed, not from
Athens to Sardis, or from Corinth to Lemnos, but from heaven to earth;
and here, ill at ease, and troubled in this new and strange place, she
hangs her head like a decaying plant."
Hundreds of passages to the same purport might easily be cited from as
many ancient writers. Sometimes this fall of souls from their original
estate was represented as a simultaneous event: a part of the 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 that sail around the
upper world of the gods. That ennui or plaintive sadness which in all
life's deep and lonesome hours seems native to our hearts, what is it but
the nostalgia of the soul remembering and pining after its distant home?
Vague and forlorn airs come floating into our consciousness, as from
an infinitely remote clime, freighted with a luxury of depressing
melancholy.
"Ah! not the nectarous poppy lovers use, Not daily labor's dull Lethean
spring, Oblivion in lost angels can infuse Of the soil'd glory and the
trailing wing."
How attractive all this must be to the thoughts of men, how fascinating
to their retrospective and aspiring reveries, it should be needless to
repeat. How baseless it is as a philosophical theory demanding sober
belief, it should be equally superfluous to illustrate further.

The third answer to the question concerning the origin of the soul is
that it is directly created by the voluntary power of God. This is the
theory of faith, instinctively shrinking from the difficulty of the
problem on its scientific ground, and evading it by a wholesale
reference to Deity. Some writers have held that all souls were created
by the Divine fiat at the beginning of the world, and laid up in a secret
repository, whence they are drawn as occasion calls. The Talmudists
say, "All souls were made during the six days of creation; and therefore
generation is not by traduction, but by infusion of a soul into body."
Others maintain that this production of souls was not confined to any
past period, but is continued still, a new soul being freshly created for
every birth. Whenever certain