 At around this time, More also began to embrace another Platonic idea, and one which had been introduced into Christian thought in the third century by Origen (though never accepted as orthodox), namely the pre-existence of the individual soul before its incarnation (Reid 2012, Hengstermann 2017). He devoted another poem to his first exposition of this, The Praeexistency of the Soul, which was included in his collected Philosophical Poems of 1647. This is a clear example of how More’s pursuit of a rational theology led him to unusual, if not entirely idiosyncratic, positions. His Platonic insistence on the immortality of the soul led him to reject the notion that every individual human soul was created at its conception, in favour of the Origenian position that all intellectual natures were created equal and alike from the beginning of eternity (Scott 1991). This was also bound up with More’s concern for the perfect goodness of God—More did not want to involve God in colluding with the illicit sexual acts of sinners by intervening in their acts to create souls for their illegitimate progeny. As More later put it in the notes to his edition of George Rust’s Origenian Discourse of Truth (1682), God must not be made to “bear a part amongst Pimps and Bawds, and pocky whores and Whoremasters, to rise out of his Seat for them, and by a free Act of Creation of a Soul, to set his seal of connivance to their Villanies” (More 1682, 9). Although More adopted the pre-existence of souls, he did not embrace Origen’s belief in universal salvation —the idea that all souls would eventually be saved and rewarded with heavenly bliss. Evidently, More took this doctrine to undermine God’s justice, and affirmed eternal punishment for sinners (Hengstermann 2017).