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It offers us no glimpse of a single soul flitting from darkness to light, from death to rebirth, through myriads of millions of years; but it leaves the main idea of pre-existence almost exactly in the form enunciated by the Buddha himself.
Buddha claimed no such antecedent glory; he spoke of himself as a man merely; the whole aim of his teaching was to show in himself what every man might accomplish. Later legends ascribe to him a sort of pre-existence, in which five hundred and thirty successive lives were passed, sometimes as a man, sometimes as a god, many times as an animal.
The Beloved One loveth not that ye be consumed with the fire of your desires. Were ye to be shut out as by a veil from Him, this would be for no other reason than your own waywardness and ignorance. Ye make mention of Me, and know Me not. Ye call upon Me, and are heedless of My Revelation, notwithstanding that I came unto you from the heaven of pre-existence with surpassing glory.
This undoubtedly was the effect of our increased commercial habits, but it was as undoubtedly the cause of those habits becoming stronger and more general: it supposed the pre-existence of a certain degree of commercial confidence and credit, but it increased these in a much greater ratio than they existed before: and if England owes its very superior wealth to any other causes besides its free government, its superior industry, and improvements in machinery, those causes must be sought for in the very extensive diffusion of commercial confidence and credit.
He rightly conceived of Christ's pre-existence. The phrase resembles Christ's own words, when He said: "Before Abraham was, I am." With such words the Baptist taught his disciples. He insisted that Jesus of Nazareth had an existence anterior to Nazareth, and previous to his birth of the village maiden.
But it tantalizes, this haunting, like those sudden surprises of sensation within us, though seemingly not of us, which some dreamers have sought to interpret as inherited remembrances, recollections of pre-existence.... Vainly you ask yourself: "Whose voice? whose face?"
This kind of “creative synthesis,” that is, the underivability of the individual, was the element of truth in the mythologies of “creationism” held by the Church fathers, or in the theory of the “pre-existence of the soul” maintained by Plato and others.
That there was an Inner Doctrine in the early Christian Church seems to be well established, and that a part of that doctrine consisted in a teaching of Pre-existence of the Soul and some form of Rebirth or Reincarnation seems quite reasonable to those who have made a study of the subject.
Justin does not consider Christians who believe in the natural birth of Jesus, of whom he implies that there is a respectable minority, to be heretics, though he himself strongly holds the preternatural birth of Jesus and his pre-existence as the "Logos" or "Word."
The two people entertain no vulgar doubt of each other: but this pre-existence of both occurs to the mind as something indelicate. To be altogether right, they should have had twin birth together, at the same moment with the feeling that unites them. Then indeed it would be simple and perfect and without reserve or afterthought.
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