Theosophical Review - 17 Author:Helena Petrovna Blavatsky Volume: 17 General Books publication date: 2009 Original publication date: 1896 Original Publisher: Theosophical Publishing Society. Subjects: Theosophy Religion / Theosophy Notes: This is a black and white OCR reprint of the original. It has no illustrations and there may be typos or missing text. When you buy the General Books edition... more » of this book you get free trial access to Million-Books.com where you can select from more than a million books for free. Excerpt: EARLY CHRISTIANITY AND ITS TEACHINGS. (Continued from. p. 164. V. The Pre-existence Of The Soul. Among the many doctrines forgotten or discarded by modern Christianity, none is more valuable or more worthy of consideration than that of the pre-existence of the human soul, its continuity not only in the future, but in the past. According to the common religious view the soul starts at some definite period of time, launched into being by the will of God, or proceeding in some mysterious way from the souls of the parents, and having been impelled from non- existence into life, it continues through the endless stages of all future time. There is a beginning, a continuation, but no end. Such an illogical theory of existence has practically held the field for centuries. It has been declared by the authorities of the Church to be the true Catholic doctrine. That it is unintelligible does not appear to be of great consequence, as it is only one of many doctrines having the same characteristic, and it is not given to man to pry into the secrets of his God. The point we have to settle is not, however, whether the Church as it is at present, or that of a few centuries back, held to this belief, but whether it has been universal in the Christian Church, and the accepted doctrine from the beginning. If we find traces of another belief in the first centuries of Christianity, when the faith was young and fresh, we are more likely to arrive at the original teachings by considering such traces without regard to...« less