Christianity is not exempt from this idea. Origen and other Church
Fathers believed in it. Origen says: "For God, justly disposing of his
creatures according to their desert, united the diversities of minds
in one congruous world, that he might, as it were, adorn his mansion
(in which ought to be not only vases of gold and silver, but of wood
also and clay, and some to honor and some to dishonor) with these
diverse vases, minds or souls. To these causes the world owes its
diversity, while Divine Providence disposes each according to his
tendency, mind and disposition." He also says: "I think this is a
question how it happens that the human mind is influenced now by the
good, now by the evil. The causes of this I suspect to be more ancient
than this corporeal birth." The idea of Reincarnation spread so fast
amongst the early Christians that Justinian was obliged to suppress it
by passing a law in the Council of Constantinople in 538 A.D. The law
was this: "Whoever shall support the mythical presentation of the
pre-existence of the soul, and the consequently wonderful opinion of
its return, let him be Anathema." The Gnostics and Manichaeans
propagated the tenets of Reincarnation amongst the mediaeval sects
such as the Bogomiles and Paulicians. Some of the followers of this
so-called erroneous belief were cruelly persecuted in 385 A.D.

In the seventeenth century some of the Cambridge Platonists, as
Dr. Henry More and others, accepted the idea of rebirth. Most of the
German philosophers of the middle ages and of recent days have
advocated and upheld this doctrine. Many quotations can be given from
the writings of great thinkers, like Kant, Scotus, Schelling, Fichte,
Leibnitz, Schopenhauer, Giardano Bruno, Goethe, Lessing, Herder and a
host of others. The great skeptic Hume says in his posthumous essay on
"The Immortality of the Soul," "The metempsychosis is therefore the