“If we could legitimately determine any question of belief by the number of its adherents, the ——­ would apply to metempsychosis more fitly than to any other.  I think it is quite as likely to be revived and to come to the front as any rival theory.”—­Prof.  Wm. Knight.

“It seems to me, a firm and well-grounded faith in the doctrine of Christian metempsychosis might help to regenerate the world.  For it would be a faith not hedged around with many of the difficulties and objections which beset other forms of doctrine, and it offers distinct and pungent motives for trying to lead a more Christian life, and for loving and helping our brother-man.”—­Prof.  Francis Bowen.

“The doctrine of Metempsychosis may almost claim to be a natural or innate belief in the human mind, if we may judge from its wide diffusion among the nations of the earth, and its prevalence throughout the historical ages.”—­Prof.  Francis Bowen.

“When Christianity first swept over Europe, the inner thought of its leaders was deeply tinctured with this truth.  The Church tried ineffectually to eradicate it, but in various sects it kept sprouting forth beyond the time of Erigina and Bonaventura, its mediaeval advocates.  Every great intuitional soul, as Paracelsus, Boehme, and Swedenborg, has adhered to it.  The Italian luminaries, Giordano Bruno and Campanella. embraced it.  The best of German philosophy is enriched by it.  In Schopenhauer, Lessing, Hegel, Leibnitz, Herder, and Fichte, the younger, it is earnestly advocated.  The anthropological systems of Kant and Schelling furnish points of contact with it.  The younger Helmont, in De Revolutione Animarum, adduces in two hundred problems all the arguments which may be urged in favor of the return of souls into human bodies according to Jewish ideas.  Of English thinkers, the Cambridge Platonists defended it with much learning and acuteness, most conspicuously Henry More; and in Cudsworth and Hume it ranks as the most rational theory of immortality.  Glanvil’s Lux Orientalis devotes a curious treatise to it.  It captivated the minds of Fourier and Leroux.  Andre Pezzani’s book on The Plurality of the Soul’s Lives works out the system on the Roman Catholic idea of expiation.”—­E.D.  WALKER, in “Re-Incarnation, a Study of Forgotten Truth.”

And in the latter part of the Nineteenth Century, and this the early part of the Twentieth Century, the general public has been made familiar with the idea of Metempsychosis, under the name of Re-incarnation, by means of the great volume of literature issued by The Theosophical Society and its allied following.  No longer is the thought a novelty to the Western thinker, and many have found within themselves a corroborative sense of its truth.  In fact, to many the mere mention of the idea has been sufficient to awaken faint shadowy memories of past lives, and, to such, many heretofore unaccountable traits of character, tastes, inclinations, sympathies, dislikes, etc., have been explained.