We get much in St. Augustine, which he himself declares to have derived, in the first instance, from “the writings of the Platonists,” which doubtless means above all Plotinus, (that keen spiritual thinker who can so readily be traced throughout this part of the great Convert’s teaching), as to this profound incommensurableness between spiritual presence, energizing, and affectedness on the one hand, and spacial position, extension, and movement on the other. “What place is there within me, to which my God can come? … I would not exist at all, unless Thou already wert within me.” “Thou wast never a place, and yet we have receded from Thee; and we have drawn near to Thee, yet Thou art never a place.” “ Are we submerged and do we emerge? Yet it is not places into which we are plunged and out of which we rise. What can be more like to places and yet more unlike? For here the affections are in case,--the impurity of our spirit, which flows downwards, oppressed by the love of earthly cares; and the holiness of Thy Spirit, which lifts us upwards with the love of security.”[218] For, as he teaches “the spiritual creature can only be changed by times,”--a succession within a duration: “by remembering what it had forgotten, or by learning what it did not know, or by willing what it did not will. The bodily creature can be changed by times and places,” by spacial motion, “from earth to heaven, from heaven to earth, from east to west.” “That thing is not moved through space which is not extended in space … the soul is not considered to move in space, unless it be held to be a body.”[219] In applying the doctrine just expressed to eschatological matters, St. Augustine concludes: “If it be asked whether the soul, when it goes forth from the body, is borne to some corporeal places, or to such as, though incorporeal, are like to bodies, or to what is more excellent than either: I readily answer that, unless it have some kind of body, it is not borne to bodily places at all, or, at least, that it is not borne to them by bodily motion.… But I myself do not think that it possesses any body, when it goes forth from this earthly body.… It gets borne, according to its deserts, to spiritual conditions, or to penal places having a similitude to bodies.”[220] The reader will readily note a curiously uncertain frame of mind in this last utterance. I take it that Plotinian influences are here being checked by the Jewish conception of certain, definitely located, provision-chambers (_promptuaria_), in which all souls are placed for safe keeping, between the time of the body’s death and its resurrection. So in the Fourth Book of Esra (of about 90 A.D.), “the souls of the just in their chambers said: ‘How long are we to remain here?’”; and in the Apocalypse of Baruch (of about 150-250 A.D.), “at the coming of the Messiah, the provision-chambers will open, in which the” whole, precise “number of the souls of the just have been kept, and they will come forth.”[221]