"O mortals! chilled by dreams of icy death,
Whom air-blown bubbles of a poet's breath,
Darkness and Styx in error's gulph have hurl'd,
With fabled terrors of a fabled world;
Think not, whene'er material forms expire,
Consumed by wasting age or funeral fire,
Aught else can die: souls, spurning death's decay,
Freed from their old, new tenements of clay
Forthwith assume, and wake to life again.
. . . All is change,
Nought perishes" . . .
Orger's translation[225]
Campanella, the Dominican monk, was sent into exile on account of his belief in the successive returns of the soul to earth.
The Younger Helmont, in his turn, was attacked by the inquisition for leaching this doctrine in his De Revolutione Animarum, in which he brings forward, in two hundred problems, all the arguments; that make reincarnation necessary.
Cudworth and Dr. Henry More, the Platonists of Cambridge, were faithful believers in Palingenesis; whilst Joseph Glanvill, in Lux Orientalis, finds that there are "Seven Pillars" on which Pre-existence rests.
Dr. Edward Beecher, in The Conflict of Ages and The Concord of Ages, as well as Julius Muller, the well-known German theologian, in The Christian Doctrine of Sin, warmly uphold it.
Schelling acknowledges it in his Dissertation on Metempsychosis.
Leibnitz, in his Monadology, and more especially his Theodicy, witnessed to his belief in this doctrine. Had he dared to speak out his thoughts openly, he would more effectively have advocated his "Optimism," by the teachings of evolution and rebirths, than by all the other arguments he advanced.
Chevalier Ramsey, in The Philosophical Principles of Natural and Revealed Religion, writes:
"The holy oracles always represent Paradise as our native country, and our present life as an exile. How can we be said to have been banished from a place in which we never were? This argument alone would suffice to convince us of pre-existence, if the prejudice of infancy inspired by the schoolmen had not accustomed us to look upon these expressions as metaphorical, and to believe, contrary to Scripture and reason, that we were exiled from a happy state, only for the fault and personal disobedience of our first parents....