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Updated: May 25, 2025
The author protests, in vehement language, against those Hellenists who, misled by their polytheistic associations, would elevate Jesus into a god. Nevertheless, his own hypothesis of pre-existence supplied at once the requisite fulcrum for those Gnostics who wished to reconcile a strict monotheism with the ascription of divine attributes to Jesus.
It is a mere delusion of the fancy to conceive the pre-existence of the ideas, in any chain of association, as so many differently coloured billiard- balls in contact, so that when an object, the billiard-stick, strikes the first or white ball, the same motion propagates itself through the red, green, blue and black, and sets the whole in motion.
"Came down from heaven" shows pre-existence in the bosom of the Absolute. "And was incarnate" shows the descent of the Spirit into the flesh in the womb of Mary. "And was made man" shows the taking on of the physical body of the infant in the womb. Does not the Mystic teaching give a clearer light on this statement of the Creed?
Some of those who affirm this pre-existence have gone as far as metempsychosis. The younger van Helmont held this opinion, and the ingenious author of some metaphysical Meditations, published in 1678 under the name of William Wander, appears to have some leaning towards it. St. Augustine inclined to this judgement the better to explain original sin.
In other words, this continued existence of Christ as God is a counterpart of that existence before the incarnation, which the doctrine of the pre-existence alleged. But surely this speculation can have no better standing than that of the pre-existence. Sin in the language of religion is defection from the law of God. It is the transgression of the divine command.
How are the notions of a change, such as that supposed, to be reconciled with common knowledge of existing religious sentiment in the West, and the force of religious emotionalism? Were the ideas of pre-existence and of the soul as multiple really antagonistic to Western religious sentiment, no satisfactory answer could be made. But are they so antagonistic?
But in neither of the foregoing cases will that explanation suffice, for in neither case had the person who saw ever been in the place of which they had a vision. One desperate resource, the convenient theory of pre-existence, is useless here.
Until after Twelfth Night the Christmas festivities were continued; but if the truth had been admitted, the cumbrous ceremonials, the excessive eating and visiting, would have been pronounced by every one very tiresome. Julius found it particularly so, for the festival had no roots in his boyhood's heart; and he did not include it in his dreams of pre-existence.
Ideas impossible a generation ago are changing current thought, destroying old tastes, and developing higher feelings. Creative art, working under larger inspiration, is telling what absolutely novel and exquisite sensations, what hitherto unimaginable pathos, what marvelous deepening of emotional power, may be gained in literature with the recognition of the idea of pre-existence.
And, on the other hand, he looks on a false or illusory percept as arising in another way not involving, as its condition, the pre-existence of a corresponding material body or physical agent. And in this view of perception, as of other mental phenomena, the psychologist clearly takes for granted the principle that all mental events conform to the law of causation.
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