chooses, is responsible for his choice. After making their choice, the souls go to the fates, who spin the threads of their destiny, and it is thenceforth irreversible. As Christian theology teaches that man was free but lost his freedom by the fall of Adam, so Plato affirms that the preëxistent soul is free until it has chosen its lot in life." See Introductions to the above mentioned works of Plato in Jowett's translation. Philo held that all souls are emanations from God, and that those who allowed themselves, unlike the angels, to be attracted by matter, are punished for this fall by imprisonment in the body, which corrupts them, and from which they must break loose. See Philo, De Gigantibus, Pfeiffer's ed., 2 : 360–364. Origen accounted for disparity of conditions at birth by the differences in the conduct of these same souls in a previous state. God's justice at the first made all souls equal; condition here corresponds to the degree of previous guilt; Mat. 20:3-"others standing in the market place idle "souls not yet brought into the world. The Talmudists regarded all souls as created at once in the beginning, and as kept like grains of corn in God's granary, until the time should come for joining each to its appointed body. See Origen, De Anima, 7; πepi ȧpxŵv, ii:9:6; cf.i:1:2, 4, 18; 4:36. Origen's view was condemned at the Synod of Constantinople, 538. Many of the preceding facts and references are taken from Bruch, Lehre der Präexistenz, translated in Bib. Sac., 20: 681-733.

For modern advocates of the theory, see Kant, Critique of Pure Reason, sec. 15; Religion in. d. Grenzen d. bl. Vernunft, 26, 27; Julius Müller, Doctrine of Sin, 2:357-401; Edward Beecher, Conflict of Ages. The idea of preexistence has appeared to a notable extent in modern poetry. See Vaughan, The Retreate (1621); Wordsworth, Intimations of Immortality in Early Childhood; Tennyson, Two Voices, stanzas 105-119, and Early Sonnets, 25-"As when with downcast eyes we muse and brood, And ebb into a former life, or seem To lapse far back in some confused dream To states of mystical similitude; If one but speaks or hems or stirs his chair, Ever the wonder waxeth more and more, So that we say 'All this hath been before, All this hath been, I know not when or where.' So, friend, when first I looked upon your face, Our thought gave answer each to each, so true- Opposed mirrors each reflecting each-That though I knew not in what time or place, Methought that I had often met with you, And either lived in either's heart and speech." Robert Browning, La Saisiaz, and Christina: "Ages past the soul existed; Here an age 't is resting merely, And hence fleets again for ages." Rossetti, House of Life: "I have been here before, But when or how I cannot tell; I know the grass beyond the door, The sweet, keen smell, The sighing sound, the lights along the shore. You have been mine before, How long ago I may not know; But just when, at that swallow's soar, Your neck turned so, Some veil did fall - I knew it all of yore"; quoted in Colegrove, Memory, 103-106, who holds the phenomenon due to false induction and interpretation.

Briggs, School, College and Character, 95-"Some of us remember the days when we were on earth for the first time; "-which reminds us of the boy who remembered sitting in a corner before he was born and crying for fear he would be a girl. A more notable illustration is that found in the Life of Sir Walter Scott, by Lockhart, his sonin-law, 8:274-"Yesterday, at dinner time, I was strangely haunted by what I would call the sense of preexistence-viz., a confused idea that nothing that passed was said for the first time that the same topics had been discussed and the same persons had started the same opinions on them. It is true there might have been some ground for recollections, considering that three at least of the company were old friends and had kept much company together. . . . . But the sensation was so strong as to resemble what is called a mirage in the desert, or a calenture on board of ship, when lakes are seen in the desert and sylvan landscapes in the sea. It was very distressing yesterday and brought to mind the fancies of Bishop Berkeley about an ideal world. There was a vile sense of want of reality in all I did and said. . . . . I drank several glasses of wine, but these only aggravated the disorder. I did not find the in vino veritas of the philosophers."

To the theory of preëxistence we urge the following objections:

(a) It is not only wholly without support from Scripture, but it directly contradicts the Mosaic account of man's creation in the image of God, and Paul's description of all evil and death in the human race as the result of Adam's sin,

Gen. 1:27-"And God created man in his own image, in the image of God created he him"; 31-"And God saw every thing that he had made, and, behold, it was very good." Rom. 5: 12-"Therefore, as through one man sin entered into the world, and death through sin; and so death passed unto all men, for that all sinned." The theory of preexistence would still leave it doubtful whether all men are sinners, or whether God assembles only sinners upon the earth.

(b) If the soul in this preëxistent state was conscious and personal, it is inexplicable that we should have no remembrance of such preëxistence, and of so important a decision in that previous condition of being;—if the soul was yet unconscious and impersonal, the theory fails to show how a moral act involving consequences so vast could have been performed at all.

Christ remembered his preëxistent state; why should not we? There is every reason to believe that in the future state we shall remember our present existence; why should we not now remember the past state from which we came? It may be objected that Augustinians hold to a sin of the race in Adam-a sin which none of Adam's descendants can remember. But we reply that no Augustinian holds to a personal existence of each member of the race in Adam, and therefore no Augustinian needs to account for lack of memory of Adam's sin. The advocate of preexistence, however, does hold to a personal existence of each soul in a previous state, and therefore needs to account for our lack of memory of it.

(c) The view sheds no light either upon the origin of sin, or upon God's justice in dealing with it, since it throws back the first transgression to a state of being in which there was no flesh to tempt, and then represents God as putting the fallen into sensuous conditions in the highest degree unfavorable to their restoration.

This theory only increases the difficulty of explaining the origin of sin, by pushing back its beginning to a state of which we know less than we do of the present. To say that the soul in that previous state was only potentially conscious and personal, is to deny any real probation, and to throw the blame of sin on God the Creator. Pfleiderer, Philos. of Religion, 1:228—"In modern times, the philosophers Kant, Schelling and Schopenhauer have explained the bad from an intelligible act of freedom, which (according to Schelling and Schopenhauer) also at the same time effectuates the temporal existence and condition of the individual soul. But what are we to think of as meant by such a mystical deed or act through which the subject of it first comes into existence? Is it not this, that perhaps under this singular disguise there is concealed the simple thought that the origin of the bad lies not so much in a doing of the individual freedom as rather in the rise of it,- that is to say, in the process of development through which the natural man becomes a moral man, and the merely potentially rational man becomes an actually rational man?"

(d) While this theory accounts for inborn spiritual sin, such as pride and enmity to God, it gives no explanation of inherited sensual sin, which it holds to have come from Adam, and the guilt of which must logically be denied.

While certain forms of the preexistence theory are exposed to the last objection indicated in the text, Julius Müller claims that his own view escapes it; see Doctrine of Sin, 2:393. His theory, he says, "would contradict holy Scripture if it derived inborn sinfulness solely from this extra-temporal act of the individual, without recognizing in this sinfulness the element of hereditary depravity in the sphere of the natural life, and its connection with the sin of our first parents." Müller, whose trichotomy here determines his whole subsequent scheme, holds only the veμa to have thus fallen in a preexistent state. The x comes, with the body, from Adam. The tempter only brought man's latent perversity of will into open transgression. Sinfulness, as hereditary, does not involve guilt, but the hereditary principle is the "medium through which the transcendent self-perversion of the spiritual nature of man is transmitted to his whole temporal mode of being." While man is born guilty as to his veuμa, for the reason that this veûμa sinned in a preëxistent state, he is also born guilty as to his vx, because this was one with the first man in his transgression.

Even upon the most favorable statement of Müller's view, we fail to see how it can consist with the organic unity of the race; for in that which chiefly constitutes us men -the veÙμa-we are as distinct and separate creations as are the angels. We also fail to see how, upon this view, Christ can be said to take our nature; or, if he takes it, how it can be without sin. See Ernesti, Ursprung der Sünde, 2:1-247; Frohschammer, Ursprung der Seele, 11-17: Philippi, Glaubenslehre, 3:92-122; Bruch, Lehre der Präexistenz, translated in Bib. Sac., 20: 681-733. Also Bib. Sac., 11: 186-191; 12: 156; 17: 419-427; 20:447: Kahnis, Dogmatik, 3:250-"This doctrine is inconsistent with the indisputable fact that the souls of children are like those of the parents; and it ignores the connection of the individual with the race."

2. The Creatian Theory.

This view was held by Aristotle, Jerome, and Pelagius, and in modern times has been advocated by most of the Roman Catholic and Reformed theologians. It regards the soul of each human being as immediately created by God and joined to the body either at conception, at birth, or at some time between these two. The advocates of the theory urge in its favor certain texts of Scripture, referring to God as the Creator of the human spirit, together with the fact that there is a marked individuality in the child, which cannot be explained as a mere reproduction of the qualities existing in the parents.

Creatianism, as ordinarily held, regards only the body as propagated from past generations. Creatianists who hold to trichotomy would say, however, that the animal soul, the x, is propagated with the body, while the highest part of man, the veûμa, is in each case a direct creation of God,- the veûμа not being created, as the advocates of preexistence believe, ages before the body, but rather at the time that the body assumes its distinct individuality.

Aristotle (De Anima) first gives definite expression to this view. Jerome speaks of God as "making souls daily." The scholastics followed Aristotle, and through the influence of the Reformed church, creatianism has been the prevailing opinion for the last two hundred years. Among its best representatives are Turretin, Inst., 5:13 (vol. 1:425); Hodge, Syst. Theol., 2; 65-76; Martensen, Dogmatics, 141-148; Liddon, Elements of Religion, 99-106. Certain Reformed theologians have defined very exactly God's method of creation. Polanus (5:31:1) says that God breathes the soul into boys, forty days, and into girls, eighty days, after conception. Göschel (in Herzog, Encyclop., art.: Seele) holds that while dichotomy leads to traducianism, trichotomy allies itself to that form of creatianism which regards the veûμa as a direct creation of God, but the x as propagated with the body. To the latter answers the family name; to the former the Christian name. Shall we count George Macdonald as a believer in Preëxistence or in Creatianism, when he writes in his Baby's Catechism: “Where did you come from, baby dear? Out of the everywhere into here. Where did you get your eyes so blue? Out of the sky, as I came through. Where did you get that little tear? I found it waiting when I got here. Where did you get that pearly ear? God spoke, and it came out to hear. How did they all just come to be you? God thought about me, and so I grew."

Creatianism is untenable for the following reasons:

(a) The passages adduced in its support may with equal propriety be regarded as expressing God's mediate agency in the origination of human souls; while the general tenor of Scripture, as well as its representations of God as the author of man's body, favor this latter interpretation.

Passages commonly relied upon by creatianists are the following: Eccl. 12:7-"the spirit returneth unto God who gave it"; Is. 57: 16-"the souls that I have made"; Zech. 12:1-"Jehovah .... who formeth the spirit of man within him"; Heb. 12:9- "the Father of spirits." But God is with equal clearness declared to be the former of man's body: see Ps. 139:13, 14-"thou didst form my inward parts: Thou didst cover me [ marg. 'knit me together'] in my mother's womb. I will give thanks unto thee; for I am fearfully and wonderfully made: Wonderful are thy works"; Jer. 1:5-"I formed thee in the belly." Yet we do not hesitate to interpret these latter passages as expressive of mediate, not immediate,

creatorship,-God works through natural laws of generation and development so far as the production of man's body is concerned. None of the passages first mentioned forbid us to suppose that he works through these same natural laws in the production of the soul. The truth in creatianism is the presence and operation of God in all natural processes. A transcendent God manifests himself in all physical begetting. Shakespeare: "There's a divinity that shapes our ends, Rough hew them how we will." Pfleiderer, Grundriss, 112-"Creatianism, which emphasizes the divine origin of man, is entirely compatible with Traducianism, which emphasizes the mediation of natural agencies. So for the race as a whole, its origin in a creative activity of God is quite consistent with its being a product of natural evolution."

(b) Creatianism regards the earthly father as begetting only the body of his child-certainly as not the father of the child's highest part. This makes the beast to possess nobler powers of propagation than man; for the beast multiplies himself after his own image.

The new physiology properly views soul, not as something added from without, but as the animating principle of the body from the beginning and as having a determining influence upon its whole development. That children are like their parents, in intellectual and spiritual as well as in physical respects, is a fact of which the creatian theory gives no proper explanation. Mason, Faith of the Gospel, 115-"The love of parents to children and of children to parents protests against the doctrine that only the body is propagated." Aubrey Moore, Science and the Faith, 207,-quoted in Contemp. Rev., Dec. 1893:876-"Instead of the physical derivation of the soul, we stand for the spiritual derivation of the body." We would amend this statement by saying that we stand for the spiritual derivation of both soul and body, natural law being only the operation of spirit, human and divine.

(c) The individuality of the child, even in the most extreme cases, as in the sudden rise from obscure families and surroundings of marked men like Luther, may be better explained by supposing a law of variation impressed upon the species at its beginning - a law whose operation is foreseen and supervised by God.

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The differences of the child from the parent are often exaggerated; men are generally more the product of their ancestry and of their time than we are accustomed to think. Dickens made angelic children to be born of depraved parents, and to grow up in the slums. But this writing belongs to a past generation, when the facts of heredity were unrecognized. George Eliot's school is nearer the truth; although she exaggerates the doctrine of heredity in turn, until all idea of free will and all hope of escaping our fate vanish. Shaler, Interpretation of Nature, 78, 90—"Separate motives, handed down from generation to generation, sometimes remaining latent for great periods, to become suddenly manifested under conditions the nature of which is not discernible... Conflict of inheritances [from different ancestors] may lead to the institution of variety."

Sometimes, in spite of George Eliot, a lily grows out of a stagnant pool - how shall we explain the fact? We must remember that the paternal and the maternal elements are themselves unlike; the union of the two may well produce a third in some respects unlike either; as, when two chemical elements unite, the product differs from either of the constituents. We must remember also that nature is one factor; nurture is another; and that the latter is often as potent as the former (see Galton, Inquiries into Human Faculty, 77-81). Environment determines to a large extent both the fact and the degree of development. Genius is often another name for Providence. Yet before all and beyond all we must recognize a manifold wisdom of God, which in the very organization of species impresses upon it a law of variation, so that at proper times and under proper conditions the old is modified in the line of progress and advance to something higher. Dante, Purgatory, canto vii-"Rarely into the branches of the tree Doth human worth mount up; and so ordains He that bestows it, that as his free gift It may be called." Pompilia, the noblest character in Robert Browning's Ring and the Book, came of "a bad lot." Geo. A. Gordon, Christ of To-day, 123-126-"It is mockery to account for Abraham Lincoln and Robert Burns and William Shakespeare upon naked principles of heredity and environment. All intelligence and all high character are

....

transcendent, and have their source in the mind and heart of God. It is in the range of Christ's transcendence of his earthly conditions that we note the complete uniqueness of his person."

(d) This theory, if it allows that the soul is originally possessed of depraved tendencies, makes God the direct author of moral evil; if it holds the soul to have been created pure, it makes God indirectly the author of moral evil, by teaching that he puts this pure soul into a body which will inevitably corrupt it.

The decisive argument againt creatianism is this one, that it makes God the author of moral evil. See Kahnis, Dogmatik, 3:250-" Creatianism rests upon a justly antiquated dualism between soul and body, and is irreconcilable with the sinful condition of the human soul. The truth in the doctrine is just this only, that generation can bring forth an immortal human life only according to the power imparted by God's word, and with the special coöperation of God himself." The difficulty of supposing that God immediately creates a pure soul, only to put it into a body that will infallibly corrupt it-"sicut vinum in vase acetoso"-has led many of the most thoughtful Reformed theologians to modify the creatian doctrine by combining it with traducianism.

Rothe, Dogmatik, 1: 249-251, holds to creatianism in a wider sense-a union of the paternal and maternal elements under the express and determining efficiency of God. Ebrard, Dogmatik, 1:327-332, regards the soul as new-created, yet by a process of mediate creation according to law, which he calls 'metaphysical generation.' Dorner, System of Doctrine, 3:56, says that the individual is not simply a manifestation of the species; God applies to the origination of every single man a special creative thought and act of will; yet he does this through the species, so that it is creation by law, - else the child would be, not a continuation of the old species, but the establishment of a new one. So in speaking of the human soul of Christ, Dorner says (3:340-349) that the soul itself does not owe its origin to Mary nor to the species, but to the creative act of God. This soul appropriates to itself from Mary's body the elements of a human form, purifying them in the process so far as is consistent with the beginning of a life yet subject to development and human weakness.

Bowne, Metaphysics, 500-"The laws of heredity must be viewed simply as descriptions of a fact and never as its explanation. Not as if ancestors passed on something to posterity, but solely because of the inner consistency of the divine action" are children like their parents. We cannot regard either of these mediating views as selfconsistent or intelligible. We pass on therefore to consider the traducian theory which we believe more fully to meet the requirements of Scripture and of reason. For further discussion of creatianism, see Frohschammer, Ursprung der Seele, 18-58; Alger, Doctrine of a Future Life, 1-17.

3. The Traducian Theory.

This view was propounded by Tertullian, and was implicitly held by Augustine. In modern times it has been the prevailing opinion of the Lutheran Church. It holds that the human race was immediately created in Adam, and, as respects both body and soul, was propagated from him by natural generation - all souls since Adam being only mediately created by God, as the upholder of the laws of propagation which were originally established by him.

Tertullian, De Anima: "Tradux peccati, tradux animæ." Gregory of Nyssa: "Man being one, consisting of soul and body, the common beginning of his constitution must be supposed also one; so that he may not be both older and younger than himself — that in him which is bodily being first, and the other coming after" (quoted in Crippen, Hist. of Christ. Doct., 80). Augustine, De Pec. Mer. et Rem., 3:7 — “In Adam all sinned, at the time when in his nature all were still that one man"; De Civ. Dei, 13: 14-" For we all were in that one man, when we all were that one man. . . . . The form in which we each should live was not as yet individually created and distributed to us, but there already existed the seminal nature from which we were propagated."