Theosophy : Mysticism by Annie Besant : AnandGholap.net

	CONTENTS

I.	THE MEANING AND METHOD OF MYSTICISM	1
II.	THE GOD-IDEA	30
III.	THE CHRIST-IDEA	59
IV.	THE MAN-IDEA	85
V.	INTERPRETATIONS	113

There is no doubt, for any observant person, that what is sometimes called a ‘wave’ of mysticism is passing over the world at the present time. It matters not whether you travel in the East or in the West; it matters not whether you look at the churches or at the many bodies outside the recognised churches in Christendom; wherever you look you see the same fact emerging - that men and women are turning away from external proof towards inner realisation; that they are beginning to feel that not the authority from outside but the authority from within ought to be the guiding force of life; that they are beginning to feel that scriptures, however sacred, authority, however venerable, is not [1] the final word of religion for man. And so on all sides you see a searching, a desire, a longing, to replace faith by knowledge, speculation by certainty.

You may remember, looking over the last year or two, that that which is called Mysticism has met with expositions in this country, and you may remember, perhaps with some feeling of slight amusement, that it was the pronouncement of the Dean of S. Paul’s which induced the Times newspaper to change its attitude to Mysticism. “We had thought,” said the Times, “that Mysticism was an exploded superstition”. It is true that Lord Rosebery had spoken of Cromwell as a practical mystic, and had stated in various ways that the practical mystic was a very terrible person, that he was a man apt to carry everything before him, a man to be reckoned with in the outer world as well as in the inner; but then you would agree with me that a man like Cromwell is not exactly the kind of man that the Times would approve of, unless he lived some centuries ago, and did not cause unrest and disturbance in the eminently respectable society in which the Times desires to live and move. But when a Dean, and not only a Dean, but a Dean of the Metropolis of the Empire, a Dean of S. Paul’s - surely the most respectable of all ecclesiastical dignitaries - when a man like that came out with the statement that “Mysticism is the [2] most scientific form of religion”, you cannot wonder that under those conditions the Times began to reconsider its view, and perhaps began to think, with some inner disturbance, that Mysticism was rather an explosive superstition than the exploded superstition, the burst and dead shell, which it had hitherto hoped that it was. It had belonged to cranks like Theosophists, to foolish people; but when a Dean pronounced it scientific, then, like mesmerism rebaptised as hypnotism, it could be accepted in respectable society and brought within the purview of the ordinary respectable man.

And so now we can deal with Mysticism without fear of being called superstitious for the dealing, and we may perhaps begin by asking: Why did the Dean of S. Paul’s declare that Mysticism was the most scientific form of religion, why did he remove it from the world of dreams and place it in the broad light of intellect, in the scientific world of fact? For a very clear and definite reason; because Mysticism, like all science, depends on the testimony of consciousness, the only sure testimony that we possess as to the existence of facts without us, as to the existence of an external world at all. It is only from the testimony of consciousness that we can argue that anything exists outside ourselves. Because, when certain impacts are made upon us, consciousness answers to those in various ways, therefore we conclude that

[3] there is an external world. We do not know that world; we only know the response of consciousness to impressions made upon us from what we presume to be an external world. Many people, because they do not think closely, do not realise that all that they know is the impressions made upon their consciousness, they presume by something outside it; they know the impressions; they are conscious of them. That which we call ourselves makes answer to something from without, and according to the nature of the answer, the part of our consciousness which responds to the impression, we classify the various external objects, label them and place them in a certain division corresponding to a division in our own consciousness. We find, for instance, that external objects, producing a certain effect upon the consciousness through the senses, are classified as the phenomena which give the basis for science, and the observations are put aside as dealing with the facts with which science is concerned. We find that another class of impressions from without arouses in us what we call feeling, a feeling of pleasure or of pain and so of attraction or repulsion, and that these gradually develop into what we know as emotions; we place them in their own category in turn and realise the emotional nature that responds in us to the impacts giving rise to those feelings and emotions. Then we find that [4] another set of impressions appeals to a different part of our consciousness and we have what we call thoughts, ideas. Percepts derived through the senses become gradually manipulated by our consciousness into thoughts, ideas, concepts, and we put them into a class by themselves. So we have three classes of impressions - the sensuous, the emotional, the mental, - and these we realise as the answers of our consciousness to certain classes of impressions made upon us by the external world.

Then we begin to ask: is this all? do these three classes include everything to which consciousness responds? is there any other part of our consciousness which does not belong to the body, or the emotions, or the mind, which will respond to certain impressions from without, a class of impressions that cannot be included in one of the three that I have named, and yet impressions that we recognise, and to which we find our consciousness respond? Hence, when the question is asked: have we exhausted all impressions in the sensuous, the emotional, the mental? The normal consciousness of humanity in all times, in all countries, in all stages of civilisation answers distinctly: No; there is something more.

And when we begin to ask what the something more is, we find a certain difficulty in making this class as precise as the others, for experience, although universal, has not [5] been carried on definitely and carefully as have the other impressions received by the body, the emotions and the mind. A sense of something greater than ourselves; a presence which in our quietest, our noblest, our purest moments is more perceptible than in the rush and in the turmoil of the world; a presence which, while it is overwhelmingly great, gives to the littleness that we experience before it a sense of joy and comfort and not of terror or of pain; something so great that it enfolds our whole nature; something so profound that we know that nothing in our own nature is alien from it; and dimly, gropingly, as might be when an eye was developing m the body and the sense of light and dark was the only response made by it, thus dimly and thus gropingly does what we call the Spirit in man stretch out to something universal and supreme to which it feels its kinship, to which it recognises its relationship; and as the babe gropes after the mother’s breast so does the child-Spirit in man grope after the bosom of the Eternal, the Universal.

At first we may not quite realise intellectually what this means. The groping of man and the answer to the groping is what we call religion. And all the religions of the world are nothing more than man’s search for God and God’s answers to the searching. And gradually as we look back over the long history of the past and find religion everywhere, from [6] the dim ignorance of the savage to the loftiest heights of the illuminated Spirit, we come to realise that this testimony of consciousness is as reliable as the testimony of consciousness in the lower worlds of emotion and of thought. We begin to trace it as we trace the others; we begin to realise that the impressions that come to the Spirit must come from something as real, if not more real, than those that come through the senses and the emotions and the mind, and we declare that this consciousness of man answers to another class of impressions that is as distinct from the other three as each is distinct from the others, and that it is on the basis of these that the religions of the world have grown up and have developed.

And we begin to see that in the constitution of man there is this fourfold answer of consciousness, his response in these four different ways to the impacts of some forces outside himself; we realise that by the use of the senses science has gradually been developed; we recognise that by the gradual purification of the emotions and their development ethics has taken its rise, and that the discipline of the emotions is moral culture; we realise that the intellect has for its product philosophy, the rational explanation of the world around us; and that the spirit has no less than the others its own domain, its own powers, its own experiences, and that these are embodied in the religions of the world, in the experiences [7] of the most highly developed of the human race.

And then we realise why the Dean of S. Paul’s said that Mysticism is the most scientific form of religion, because it is based on a part of human consciousness, because it is answered to by part of the human constitution. And if we accept the testimony of consciousness as final after long experience in every other department of life, we cannot deny it in the one in which it has spoken universally and with certainty, in that spiritual world, more real than any other, in the testimony of consciousness strongest in the most highly developed of our race.

And so we come to the “meaning of mysticism”, and we divide it from two other forms of thought with which it is sometimes confused. Mysticism is not Psychism. Now Psychism is rather a clumsy word, but I am using it in the ordinary sense, in which it means the development of certain powers by which observations are carried on in the world of matter subtler than the physical, so that you may see and hear and feel impacts of matter to which the ordinary physical body is insensitive. That belongs to the domain of the senses, not to the domain of the Spirit.

Psychism is a development of the senses; subtler than the physical certainly, but still of the nature of senses: you see, in the higher world; you hear, in the higher world; you

[8] touch, in the higher world; taste and smell have there the objects which they perceive; you are still in the world of phenomena, tangible, cognisable by the senses, and there is nothing more spiritual, if you are walking across a meadow in the country, in seeing by psychic vision the nature spirits or the fairies around you, than there is in seeing the cows and horses that are sharing the same field. In both cases you are dealing with the visible, and a sense that is finer is no more in the domain of the spiritual world than a sense which is duller. No confusion then should arise between Mysticism which belongs to the spiritual world, and psychic research which belongs to the sphere of the senses quite as much as the observation by the senses of the physical world.

Nor is Mysticism allegory or symbol. Both of these are intellectual, not spiritual. When S. Paul in the Epistle to the Galatians gave an interpretation of the story of Genesis, calling it allegory and explaining the story of Abraham and the rest from the allegorical side, saying that they are symbolic of other truths not of the physical plane; in that explanation of the allegory and the symbol you are dealing with an intellectual conception, not a spiritual. You are giving instead of the words as applied to the physical plane the symbols as applied in the world of thought. And so you may remember how Origen - a man of very [9] analytical mind whose writings deserve careful study from every student of religion - dealing with the Bible and speaking first of its historical meaning, says it is meant for the carnal-minded, the ignorant; then, for the intellectual there is the allegorical meaning, into which a man is forced when he finds absurdities in the historical narrative, such he says as the Tower of Babel, or God walking in the cool of the evening in the Garden of Eden; those things, he says, while they pass unobserved by the ignorant, strike the vision of the educated man, because they are intrinsically absurd and impossible the moment they are thought of, the intellectual man is obliged to try to find out a meaning under the veil of incredible assertions, and so he takes the allegorical meaning and he learns many great intellectual truths by applying the key of allegory to unlock the meaning of the Bible.

And he goes on to say that there is another meaning in the Bible, neither that which is historical for the ignorant, nor that which is allegorical for the instructed; there is a spiritual meaning below the other two, and that, he says, can only be known by the spiritual man; and he quotes on that the words of S. Paul, that the things of a man can only be known by the Spirit of man that is in him, and the things of God can only be known by the Spirit of God; and then he goes on to say: “Know ye not that your bodies are the [10] temple of God and the Spirit of God dwelleth in you?” Only as that Spirit illuminates the scriptures of the world can their inner truth and spiritual meaning be discerned.

So you come into the realm of Mysticism, the realm of the Spirit. It is the mystic interpretations of the great spiritual facts of the spiritual world which lie at the basis of all that is worthy to be called knowledge. Faith you may have, speculation you may have, but knowledge comes only by the Spirit, which alone, because of his identity with Deity, can know the universal Spirit whence he has come forth. And Mysticism is in its meaning, the direct knowledge of God and of the facts of the spiritual world which are partly embodied in what are called religious truths. That is really what Mysticism means - direct knowledge, as direct as the knowledge on which science is based by observation, but now not the outward-turned investigation by observation, but the inner realisation. Knowledge is the reproduction within us of something outside us, so far as the knowledge is found by the senses and the emotions and the intellect; but the knowledge of the spiritual world is an inner reproduction in the Spirit of man, a realisation of what before had been external truth. There are facts in the spiritual world as well as in the other worlds cognised by consciousness; facts, truths given out in the many religions from time [11] to time, partially given out in forms suited to the time and the nation and the type of the people to whom they were given. The facts of which those religious truths are partial explanations, the facts that you find embodied as partial truths in every religion, universal, found in every age; those spiritual verities which are the common heritage of our race, which are found in every great religion, living and dead; the truths of the nature of God, of Man, of spirit; all the great ideas which you find embodied in world-religions: those are the facts of the spiritual world: and when a man knows them directly, when the Spirit within him, the spiritual consciousness, is so unfolded, that he is able to realise them in himself and transform hearsay knowledge on the testimony of others into direct knowledge by his own observation an experience, - then and then only is that man a Mystic, a knower of the realities of the spiritual world.

Now all religions have testified to the possibility of such knowledge of God and of spiritual truths. Recall for a moment a familiar quotation from one of the great Upanishats of Hinduism, where the disciple was seeking after knowledge and went to a teacher to ask “What is knowledge?” The answer came by dividing all knowledge into two classes; one all the knowledge that can be taught to a man, including all scriptures [12] however sacred, all science, all literature, comprising the whole of that knowledge available through the sense and the feelings and the mind as the lower knowledge of God. Of God? Yes, because Hinduism excludes God from nothing, He is immanent in all, and therefore all knowledge is God-knowledge, along whatever channel it may reach the man. All that was classed together as the lower knowledge. The higher knowledge, the supreme knowledge, the Teacher went on to say, is the knowledge of Him by whom all else is known, for all the lower knowledge flows down from the higher. Once you know God, all knowledge is within your reach; for to know Him, to know Himself, is to hold the key to every riddle, and there is nothing in a universe of which God is the Life which may not be known when that supreme knowledge is mastered. And so you find the Christ declaring: “The knowledge of God is eternal life”. Very little stress is laid on that in modern Christianity. We are told to believe; are given creeds to accept, hearsay knowledge is offered to us, - part of the lower knowledge not the higher. The higher knowledge is eternal life, a present possession not a future experience, for eternal life is not life in heaven, eternal life is not life on the other side of death; eternal life is nothing that depends even on everlasting time. Eternal life is and is only the knowledge of God, they Eternal, [13] the Self of the Universe. That knowledge in itself is eternal life. Exactly the same teaching you see as the ancient teaching of the Upanishats. And so in other religions you will find the same constantly repeated.

Mysticism does more than declare that that direct knowledge is possible; it proclaims the method whereby that knowledge may be obtained; and here again, if it helps you at all, you may take quotations from the great sayings of the two religions I have already mentioned, for you find in another Upanishat where knowledge is spoken of: “Awake, arise, seek the great Teachers and attend, for verily they say the path is narrow, narrow as the edge of a razor”. And when you listen to the words of the Christ you hear Him saying: “Strait is the gate, narrow is the way that leadeth unto life (not to heaven) and few there be that find it”. I know that by a modern twist life has been changed to heaven and destruction changed to hell, but in the great spiritual world heaven and hell have no place; knowledge of God and ignorance of God: those are the pair of opposites which there you find, for knowledge of God is life and ignorance of God is destruction - not everlasting, for that cannot be where God resides in every human heart, but while He is unknown destructive agencies can touch us, where He is known eternity is ours.

You see you find the testimony to a method [14] as well as to a fact. Again the religions teach that method. You must not limit your thought on religion to the few hundred years since the Reformation, to the minority of Christians that you find in the so-called Protestant communities. You must take a larger view than that: go back over the whole of Christian antiquity and further back still over the ancient religions of the East, and then you will find that identity of knowledge which is the mark of reality, which is the keynote of Mysticism. And so you find the existence of a Path and a method declared by which the supreme knowledge may be gained. The Roman Catholic has always kept a knowledge of that Path and he calls the end of it by a startling name. Generally the word Union is used, but take up some great book of Catholic theology and you will find the startling word which I have in mind; they call it Deification, the deification of man, man become God, for nothing less than that is meant by Deification. And the Hindu and the Buddhist call it Liberation, the setting free of the human Spirit from the bonds which have tied him down, from the matter which has blinded him. The meaning is the same, the method the same, the thing the same. And so we begin to realise that in the realm of the Spirit there are none of those divisions that mark off one religion from another in the reparative plane of earth, and [15] we realise that the Spirit is united where earth holds diversity, and that where knowledge takes the place of faith, there controversies sink into silence and the certainty of truth is known.

Now the Mystic of the modern phrase is the Gnostic, the Knower of the Early Church. I said Mysticism meant the direct knowledge of God and of the facts of the spiritual world. That is exactly what is meant by the Gnostic, as he is described in those splendid pages of Origen to which I have before alluded. He points out, with a plainness of speech which I fear might make him unpopular in some evangelical circles today, that while the Church has medicine for the sick - and he says the sick are the sinners - it has also knowledge for the Gnostic, and he goes on to say quite clearly and plainly that you cannot make a Church out of sinners, that they are to come there and be made welcome for their healing, but the Church needs Gnostics for its builders and its maintenance. Too much has that thought passed out of modern Christianity. The feeling - a right and noble feeling - that the very lowest of mankind should have some message brought to him to brighten his life and to lift him out of the mire of ignorance; that righteous and charitable feeling has been exaggerated in modern Christianity, so that it would seem that which the lowest of men is able to accept is all that

[16] Christianity has for the learned and the thoughtful. But it is not so; it was not so in the days of the Church’s strength. And the return of Mysticism to Christianity is the sign that strength and vitality are coming back into the Church, that the days of Erastianism are over, that the eclipse through which Christianity passed when faith replaced knowledge and when credulity was the mark of the believer, that these dark days now lie behind you, and you are going forward into the dawn of a brighter and a better day. Again the Gnostic will reappear, the knower of the truth, for the Gnostic is the very backbone of religion, and where the Gnostics disappear there religion fails in vitality and in adaptation to life.

But some people say: How can you be sure that all these ideas of the Mystic as to God and the great truths of the spiritual world are not mere fancy, mere imagination; are you sure that they are not a subtle, although perhaps fine, form of hysteria, and is there not a danger that sanity, controlled intelligence, may vanish and superstition may take the place of true religion if the Mystic is listened to, if the knower is consulted? The answer to that is the answer which science gives, that these are facts, and the facts are proved by the identity of impression made upon the normal human consciousness by their impact. Why do you call a tree green? [17] Because the normal human sight recognises the same colour in the tree in springtime, and the word green has been taken to signify that impression. All normal eyes respond to that in a similar way, and the similarity, nay the identity, of response is taken as proof of the existence of a fact of which the impression on the human consciousness is the only thing that we can know; identity of response is practically the measure of truth for science. That is also the measure of truth in Mysticism. Where you find an identity of response in Mystics of all ages, of all religions, of all countries, there you have the only proof that science can offer us, identity of response in the normal human consciousness. You can repeat, re-verify under similar conditions, for the same impression is always found. That one test we have of objective reality is answered in the spiritual world by the Mystics of our race. They all respond in the same way to the impact of a spiritual fact. And it is in that identity of mystic response that we see as everywhere else the mark of objective truth; the Mystic’s experience of God is everywhere the same, no matter by what name God may be called. The mystic response to the Christ idea is everywhere the same, no matter what the name by which that mighty truth may he labelled in a special faith. The truth of the spiritual nature of man and its realisation is [18] everywhere the same; the contact of the human Spirit with the divine is everywhere experienced; and wherever man has the direct experience of God, whether it be in the spiritual experience of the Methodist or the experience, also spiritual, of the Saint, there you have the germ of the Mystic who gains for himself direct knowledge, not hearsay knowledge but knowledge that to the man who experiences it transcends all other certainty, which no argument is able to shake which no argument is able to strengthen.

There is a curious verse, once more in a Hindu scripture, which the Dean of S. Paul’s practically repeated in another form - I do not know whether he is a reader of the Bhagavad-Gita. It is written there, rather to the distress of the very orthodox Hindu, that the Vedas, the most sacred of books remember, are as useful to the enlightened Brahmana as a tank in a country which is all covered over with water - an admirable simile. If there is water all around you, you have no need of a tank; the tank is valuable in the dry country where water is not available, but of what use is a tank to a man who sees water everywhere around him? And of what use the written word, however sacred, to a man into whom is flowing the knowledge of God, the origin of all scriptures? And so we find the Dean of S. Paul’s declaring that the mystic does not care very much about scripture, [19] he is like a man with a reservoir; the simile the same and equally true. Direct knowledge transcends all knowledge transmitted through another.

We find there has been conflict in the past between Mysticism and dogma, and the Mystics have very often, in the Western Church at least, been persecuted during their lifetime although canonised, wisely, after their death. The Roman Catholic Church in that is very wise. It tries to keep its heretics within bounds while they are alive by threat of persecution or actual persecution, and then when it finds that danger has past, by perhaps a few centuries having gone by, it holds up the Mystic as the Saint and canonises the man or woman whom before it imprisoned. And it is wise; for your Mystic when he is of the past is always a useful buttress to the Church, although when he is living among the orthodox he is apt to be rather a cause of unrest. And the Priest and the Mystic have constantly been in opposition, for the priest has as his duty to teach the ignorant by dogma, whereas the Mystic has as his function to illuminate the profoundest truths of religion.

Now dogma is necessary at a certain stage, exactly in the same way as chemical and physical formulae are necessary when a boy is studying chemistry or physics. It would be very foolish of the boy to reject the chemical dogma because it comes to him on the authority [20] of his teacher, and guides him in his early experiments. That is the use of the formula, the use of the dogma, for a dogma, as I have often said to you, is only the intellectual presentment of one side of a spiritual truth, imposed by authority from outside. The authority may be a very good one of experts along the particular line. The chemist wisely imposes his chemical dogmas on the student in the laboratory; they are safeguards in experiments; they are the guide to knowledge. But what would you think of the chemist who, after a student had mastered his subject, said to him: “You must not verify, you must not prove, you must not make original research, you must always go on repeating the chemical formulae you learned as a boy, you must never go out into the untrodden realm of the unknown and bring back fresh knowledge?” But that is what the theologian so often does; that is what the priest so often insists upon. He takes the dogma not as a guide but as a limitation, not as a way to knowledge but as the end of knowledge, beyond which no one must venture to tread the unknown path.

Hence it is that dogmas have to be broken into pieces, because they are obstacles in the ever immortal search for truth. They must be broken when they are outgrown, and they are outgrown when the unfolding Spirit of man begins to know for himself, and no longer to need testimony from outside. And the end [21] of religious instruction ought to be to transfer the authority from outside to inside, from the book or the church or the teacher to the inner awakened Spirit of the man, to that inner Ruler Immortal who is the only true King, the human Spirit himself. For religion should be self-determined and not determined by others; religion must be self-builded, after the conditions of building have been mastered; and one religious truth realised by your own Spirit is worth a thousand testimonies from others, for it is your own for ever and none can take it from you.

Until you know God directly you are at the mercy of every clever argument around you; you cannot know Him by the senses, you cannot know Him by the emotions, you cannot know Him by the mind; you can only know Him by the Spirit that is Himself within you, and when once you know Him in yourself He will shine upon you from everything around you, and that is the only knowledge which makes your life secure.

But there is a Method of Mysticism. It is that Path, on which some two years ago in this hall I lectured, giving it step by step, as it were, so that any of you might study and tread the way, I can only now just put it in a brief form as the Method of the Mystic, which, as I just now said, is alike everywhere, for all great religions recognise the Path.

The first part of it depends on the conquest [22] of the senses, the conquest of the emotions, the conquest of the mind, the lower nature; and in order that you may understand it you have to realise that the Spirit is your eternal Self, which has come into this outer world of matter in order to subdue matter for his own purposes, that he may be its master, not its slave. People say sometimes: why did the Spirit as it is said descend into matter? Now the words descend and ascend are not good when you are speaking of the unfolding and the realisation by the Spirit of himself. I use them because they are commonly used.

The descent of the Spirit means that your eternal Self, a portion of God Himself, “a part of Myself, a living Spirit”, as he has been described, comes down into the world of matter to draw around him the matter by which he may conquer and rule in the lower worlds. That descent, at first into matter too gross to answer to his changes in consciousness, means that matter blinds him and fetters him; he gathers it around himself and it blinds him more and more as he feels the matter grow denser and denser. And yet unless he gathers it around him, how shall he come into contact with the unknown worlds of which he is to be hereafter builder and maker and ruler, transforming them into higher possibilities, permeating them with his own nature, so that they shall become expressions of the spiritual life. He begins to live wrapt round with [23] these veils of matter and by each veil he contacts a material world, comes into touch with it, has impressions made upon him by it, and the matter that he draws around him changes as his moods of consciousness change, vibrates in answer to every change, until at last he establishes around him what we call bodies, every vibration in which gradually answers to one of his changing moods and becomes an expression of himself to the outer world into which he has entered. The building up of these bodies, the making of them more and more responsive, that is the work by which, as he gradually unfolds from within, he manifests outside his own spiritual essence.

He builds a physical body because he wants to see a physical world, to hear physical sounds; he builds an emotional body because he wants to experience what is called pleasure and pain and gradually to use emotions in order that he may serve the world to which they belong; and he builds a mind, in order that his illimitable power of perception, cabined within what we call the human mind, may grow more defined, may be sharpened, may be gradually made keen to answer to all the wonderful universe of mind outside himself, and that he may know that world and turn it to the highest uses. And these senses and emotions and mind are the vehicles which he makes for his own purposes, not to be mastered by them but to use [24] them, not to be their slave but their lord. And when he has developed them, then comes the time that he can prepare himself for treading the Path; then comes the time when, as I said, he conquers the senses. What does that mean? It does not mean that he destroys them; it does not mean that he kills them, but it does mean that no sensation reaching him through the senses has any power to make him swerve from the path chosen by his will, from following out the path of evolution by which he will realise his own divinity.

He keeps the senses, nay he improves them, makes them finer and finer in subtler and subtler matter; they are his tools not his masters; they are no longer wild horses carrying him over the fields of desire, but well-broken steeds carrying him wherever he wills to go. And so with his emotions: the true Mystic does not destroy emotion but he makes it the obedient servant of the higher compassion and the higher wisdom. He gradually takes away from it the tendency to answer to the external pains and pleasures of the world, in order that he may use it for the helping of the world, for only when the world has ceased to have power to move you, are you able to help that world to tread the higher path. He uses his mind as an instrument to that end, in order to help in expressing himself. These things which in the ordinary [25] untrained man of the world are masters, senses that oftentimes degrade him, emotions that often torture him, thoughts that often harass him - these for the Mystic are the obedient servants of an illuminated intellect and a will harmonised with the Divine. And when that point is reached, then he can tread the higher stages of the Path; then he can tread it onwards to that deification of which the Roman Catholic speaks, to that liberation of which the Hindu and the Buddhist speak, and then he becomes what Lord Rosebery spoke of, the practical Mystic, the strongest type of man.

Now why is it that the practical Mystic is so strong? can overcome all obstacles? It is because he has realised the inner God, for to the deity within him no obstacle really exists, no difficulty is anything more than an empty form. Realise the God within you and what is there of outer things that can stop you, hinder you, or turn you from your Path? There is nothing in this world which is not the life of God, and when that God is realised within you all outer things become your servants; they have no power to hinder nor to control. The Mystic not only realises that Omnipotence living within himself which makes all difficulties easy and all burdens light, but he also has that perfect serenity and content which makes it impossible to crush him with sorrow or to harass him with [26] anxiety; he is content because he is seeing God in everything, and God is the Mystic’s hope and joy; in whatever He comes, in form of joy or sorrow, in form of triumph or defeat, of failure or success, it is always the life of God the Mystic sees and the form is nothing, the God within the form is always welcome and beloved. He is strong, our practical Mystic, and he not only feels the strength of deity in him and the content with all outer circumstances, but he is full of that tolerance and that sympathy which grow out of his seeing God in every one around him, and therefore not wanting to compel not wanting to control, but, respecting the divine spark in all, he leaves it to flame out in its own way without any attempt at compulsion from himself. He is equal under all conditions, because to him they are all manifestations, pure and beautiful, of their indwelling life. And he is calm because he lives in the Eternal and to him who lives in the Eternal how can there be shaking from the changes of time? It is the realisation of God within that makes the Mystic strong. And his judgment is far better than the judgment of the ordinary man of the world; for what are the things that distort your judgment? Your own prejudices, your bias - national or individual - your own desires and longings, your own personal wishes to have this or to avoid that. All these are weights in the scales of your judgment and [27] therefore the balance does not weigh truly. But the man who wants nothing because he possesses all, the man who realising God asks nothing more from earth, that man’s judgment is clear and direct because undistorted by personal desire or personal longings. He wants nothing, and all things come to him; he asks for nothing, and all is there for him to use; he desires nothing, for all the riches of the world are his. He is a steward not an owner, and all the Gods pour into his hands their wealth, because his hands are always emptied out for the helping of his fellow-men.

That is the splendour of the mystic life, this power of service which only this inner form of realisation can possibly give to any one of us. We are climbing towards it as we begin to understand something of its possibilities, as we live a little of the truth we know. But remember, if you do not live the truth you know, truth’s treasures will be locked against you, because that which you do not utilise is of no value to yourself. You must utilise what you know. Do not be like the men of whom a judge in India lately said: “Oh yes, they believe all these things, but they do not want them in their own families”. That I fear is a very common condition of mind among people who profess religion but do not live it. And so my last word of counsel, if you would become a Mystic, is this: never [28] pretend to believe a truth which you are not willing to act out in the world; never say “I believe” where you cannot also say “I act”; let your religion be small in beliefs unless it is pregnant with action, for truth is only truth for you when you have learned to live it. And the man who has learned to live one fragment of truth will find Truth herself come to him with open arms; for she only gives herself to those who are willing to surrender themselves to her, and to live every truth that she imparts. [29]

I have as subject this evening ‘The God-Idea’, and I mean by that title to indicate the many ideas of God which have been held during the evolution of mankind; and to try, if I can, to show you how in all the great religions there has existed at one time or another a lofty conception of God; that out of the past of all the great religions an idea of God may be distinguished, grasped and understood, which becomes the Mystical Idea as man seeks to know God directly in the fashion of which I spoke on Sunday last; that in all the great religions we shall find indications of a magnificent idea of God as the Life of the Universe; that we may see that emerging from time to time with other lower ideas found in the same religion, because the minds of men are many and each man’s idea of God can only be that which his own mind is able to fabricate, which satisfies the yearnings of his own heart; that wherever we go we shall find traces of the higher idea, though often [30] encumbered with lower notions and ignorant conceptions, and that we may, if we will, find that there really does exist a universal testimony to the highest that we can conceive of God, bodied out in the thoughts of the most highly developed spiritual men, and left on record for the teaching and the inspiration of the world from the earliest dawn of history down to our own day.

Now during the last century, when the science of what was called Comparative Mythology had its birth and its development, the western world of thought was startled as the many great religions of the elder world, and the younger world which was not western, came gradually within its purview. Everywhere men found that the varied religions of the world, living and dead, taught many of the same ideas, proclaimed many of the same doctrines, bore testimony to the same universal truths. By the labours of the antiquarian and the archaeologist; by the researches of the students of philology and of ancient civilisations, there was gradually unrolled before the minds of the educated and the thoughtful a mass of information, stretching back for thousands upon thousands of years, recorded in fragments of ancient cities, unburied from long-covered temples and, monuments, emerging from civilisations that long ago had vanished from the stage of history; and all of them bore testimony to religious truths which [31] in their main outlines were identical. Looking at the whole of these and comparing these records of the past, there was gradually built up a science, built out of the discovered facts which, as far as the facts went, none could challenge. Startled at this wide identity of thinking, marvelling at the enormous wealth of the religious past that thus had been unrolled, men naturally began to speculate as to the reason for the identity, and sought for the explanation of these countless likenesses emerging from every faith, as I said, living and dead.

Not unnaturally, I think, for the conclusion was drawn at a time when the educated world was far more sceptical than it is today; not unnaturally, in view of the great triumphs in unveiling the history of organisms which grew out of the studies of Darwin, Wallace and others; not unnaturally, the students of Comparative Mythology imagined that in the past men must have been much less evolved than they are today and that the child nations of antiquity could not have formulated for themselves the conceptions that were found in the literature of some of the most ancient peoples. They concluded that before those spiritual and philosophic religions there must have been a long period of unrecorded history in which, from the ignorance of the savage, from the ignorance of the barbarian personifying the powers of nature, terrified by the [32] destructive agencies he was unable to control, there gradually grew up out of the sense of helplessness and terror the primary ideas of God. They found that this view was, to some extent, from their standpoint, strengthened by the fact that among the savages of our own time there are found various forms of religion - those called animistic and the like - where the ideas, if they can be called ideas, of God are of the lowest and least developed character. Many researches into what those savage peoples really thought were not at first available. There were the records of travellers, the statements of explorers, who told us roughly the superficial views that they gathered from the savages whom they found in the countries to which they went. It was not then, I think, unnatural that they should see in the beliefs of those savage peoples, in their low and barbarous ideas of divine agencies, the origin of religion. It was not unnatural that they should imagine that the great philosophic and spiritual ideas of God had, by some process which they did not stop to work out or to prove, evolved from the primary ignorance of the savage. And so they traced back the identities in religion, the likenesses in religion, to this dark time of savage ignorance, to this personification of the powers of Nature, and, putting forward the science of Comparative Mythology based on irrefutable facts but bound together [33] by an assumption which was not proved, they came to the idea that all thought of God, as all other religious truth, was but an evolution from the past, and that we must regard that childish ideal as the origin of the later and loftier views of God.

A little later, more careful researches into savage beliefs revealed one startling and puzzling fact. You will find, I think in a book by Dr. Andrew Lang a most interesting account of the knowledge which was gradually gathered by sympathetic travellers who were trying to understand something of the thought of savage peoples. And the records that came from these later investigations all bore testimony to the fact to which I alluded, which were startling when it came out, in view of the deductions of Comparative Mythology. It was that in the background of every savage faith, kept as a sacred thing, to be spoken of only with reverence and with awe, behind all those superficial beliefs in gods and devils, behind all those thoughts of sacrifices to propitiate hostile powers, there was one Being ever believed in whose only symbol was the over-arching sky, who had no image, who had no likeness, to whom no prayers ever went up, to whom no sacrifice were ever made, a mighty all-embracing Life, spoken of sometimes as the Great Spirit, spoken of sometimes by no special name but only by symbol; indications of an idea so [34] foreign from the savage of modern thought that man began to ask how could this idea have arisen, how could it have come into the mind of the savage, how could a conception so great and all-embracing come from these undeveloped brains, these crude unevolved barbarians?

And about this time another view was put forward to account for the identities found in religions, the idea that they did not grow out of savage ignorance, but that they came from an identity of origin, from Teachers, highly developed spiritual men, who came forth into the world from time to time to give out the ever-same ideas in a form suited to the needs of the time. The idea was put forward that the child-nations of the past, the undeveloped and the unevolved, were taught by those who knew, by those who by their own evolution had reached the point where the loftier vision of the Supreme was seen; that there were traces through history that the highest ideas given to the world were always given as the basis of a new religion, and not as an evolution out of the past from the days of savagery and of ignorance; that these ideas came from the mouths of men who spoke with authority of that which they knew, and were not the dreams of savages, awe-stricken before a Nature too mighty to oppose, in which destructive agencies were rife.

And they who put forward the idea claimed [35] for evidence the scriptures of the oldest religions of the world as well as those of the more modern: they pointed to books that went back into the night of time, the Vedas of the Hindus, the sacred books of the, Zoroastrians and of the Egyptians, and of the peoples who bordered the Mediterranean Sea; they pointed to these as containing the loftiest conceptions possible to men so far of the Nature and the Being of God. And they showed that, as the religions went on, these conceptions tended to materialise instead of, keeping their original and lofty spirituality. And they based all that on evidence that could not be denied, the most ancient scriptures as yet known to the world of men.

They pointed to these, then, as evidence that the teaching about the Divine Nature was a teaching always the same, and that the traces of that still found among savage peoples, these ideas of a Great Spirit symbolised by the arching sky, were the faint remnants in degenerate nations, the dying out fragments in the remains of mighty; civilisations of the past, of the original teachings which they had received in the days when they were civilised, when they were strong.

And gradually people are beginning, I think, to realise that the savages of today are remnants of dead civilisations, and not the crude forms from which men have evolved; [36] that the ancient savages, the primeval savages, if I may say so, were really childlike people, infant nations, willing to learn and glad to be taught, and that to them came the great Instructors, to them the mighty Teachers; and that we can point first to the scriptures that remain, admittedly ancient, going back thousands upon thousands of years, and then to these surviving beliefs in the remnants of the gradually dying out barbarian nations, ideas that they most certainly could not give birth to, but that still stand as landmarks of a God Idea mightier than they now could conceive, and practically with no influence on their religion or their lives.

Two chief types of religion come down from the great race that preceded the fifth, or the Aryan, those that are called Solar Worship and Nature Worship; and we realise that in those elder days the teaching to the more ignorant, the more childish peoples was given in the form of symbol, largely drawn from Nature around them, not teaching that the natural object was God, but rather that through the outer object God was revealed, and that all Nature was but a veil of Divinity; that the power, the might, the splendour of God spoke out through the objects of His world, and that they were symbols of the Divine.

The mightiest of these symbols was, as was natural, the Sun, the source of light and heat and life on our globe. And so you find the [37] Sun as symbol, constantly shown as image, constantly appearing in legend and in myth, as the symbol of the Supreme, the Universal God. You find the Sun as a great golden disc still to be found in the temples that have been unburied, still to be found in the legends of the nations that have well-nigh passed away. Take ancient Peru as an example before the Spaniards had trampled out that splendid civilisation by fire and sword. You find the Incas called the Children of the Sun; you find that royal family regarded as the offspring of the Sun; and all through their worship, a worship of joy and of happiness, in which the sacrifices were flowers and the hymns were songs, you find the Sun as the symbol of the God they worshipped, and to whom went up the hearts of grateful men, the symbol in the lower world of the all-nourishing, all-irradiating life of God.

And so you find in the Hindu religion, where I shall have to draw your attention presently to some of the most sublime conceptions of the God-Idea that have ever been made known to our humanity, that the Sun stands as the physical symbol of God; you find how “the God in the Sun”, as He is called, is the object of daily greeting by the millions of Hindus who bathe on the banks of their rivers before sunrise, and then, as the Sun is rising, turn to it with the famous prayer: “Thee, O Sun, we worship, the glory of God resplendent; [38] may thy light illumine our intelligence”. No physical light of the Sun can illumine the intelligence of men, and that famous prayer, most sacred to all Hindus, uses the Sun as symbol of the God-Idea, the Light and Life of the world as God is the Life and Light of the Spirits that come forth from Him.

And so you find right through the history of religions traces of this symbolism of God under the form of the Sun.

And you find wherever the human element comes into the God-Idea, as it does in every great religion, that humanity is taken up as it were to deity; you find that the story of the God made man follows the course of the Sun throughout the solar year; you find the festivals of every religion, including your own, are marked by solar positions, and that one side of the story of the Christ is a repetition of the story of all the God-men of the past, born amid danger, passing through childhood in danger, coming on to manhood at a period marked by the relation of the Sun and the Moon, dying on a date which every year is fixed by the astronomical observation, rising again after that to a renewed life, and ascending into the heavens, whence His beams pour down for the ripening of the corn and of the grape, the bread and wine of human life. And as you recognise it, it does not make you disbelieve in the historical existence of the Christ, but it tells you that every mighty man [39] that human life has deified goes through a marked succession of events, alike in every great faith, drawn from what are called the myths of the past, the myths which are the great spiritual truths thrown into a story-form for the helping and the teaching of men.

And you find, again, Nature Worship permeating all great faiths without exception, in which the creative power of Deity is seen reproduced in the creative power of humanity, and God as the Universal Father, the Giver of Life, the Sustainer of Life, is shown out in symbols - innocent and beautiful in the minds of a people not yet corrupted into evil - and still persisting, as you have them, in the symbol of the Cross, known to every great religion of the past and most sacred of symbols in the Christendom of today.

That hasty but broad outline of religions that are well-nigh lost in antiquity and are only seen in their later forms in the most ancient living faiths, brings us to the next great stage of the God-Idea, in which religions were national, and the God of the religion was worshipped specially by the nation in which the religion was proclaimed. In that stage of religious proclamation, you find three great religions of the far-off historical past; I might say before history, but I take it as historical because a literature remains; and while you are unable to fix the furthest off limit for the date of that literature you are [40] able to say that it cannot be more modern than such and such a date. In the ancient world, then, looking backward to this stage, you find religion, as I said, national. The oldest of those is, of course, Hinduism, where you have a faith that still is living, fundamentally a religion but also a social polity; a social organisation, just as you find also in the Hebrew religion that the social organisation and the religious are closely intertwined, and that many a law which is purely a sanitary or hygienic law is made part of the religion, so that it might have the binding force that comes from the fulfilment of a religious obligation. Hinduism fundamentally, of course, as were the other two great religions of Egypt and the Mediterranean borders, and the ancient Persian or the faith of Zarathustra, the Zoroastrian as we generally call it, is Pantheistic. Now religious Pantheism and philosophic Pantheism are constantly confused; but their effects upon the mind of the devotee and the mind of the philosopher are quite different. Philosophic Pantheism only postulates one existence whereof all beings are modes; one infinite eternal existence, and all universes, all worlds, all separate existences of mineral, of plant, of animal, of man, modes of that one existence. Outside of such manifestations, in philosophic Pantheism, God is not; He is expressed in a universe but not outside it. He is conterminous with whatever universes [41] or worlds are existing, their fundamental life, but entirely what would now be called impersonal. This is appealing only to the intellect and not to the heart, the self-existence whereof all else is but mode, inaccessible to form of prayer or entreaty, a unfit for any emotion, save the purely Intellectual delight of a splendid theory, but in no sense religious, if you take religion as the searching of man for God and God’s answer to the searching. But when you come to pantheistic religion, then all is changed. That which is behind all forms of life is Himself the Life, the Consciousness, the Power. All forms are but an expression of part of His existence, and beyond and above all forms He Himself, in His infinite being, remains.

And where religion is pantheistic, there you always find accompanying it what the West has called Polytheism, the expression of God in many forms. Now there is a profound difference between this as seen by the Eastern, and the view which you often call Polytheism in the West, founded chiefly I think on your knowledge of the Greek and of the Roman faiths, and on your very superficial knowledge of the great religions of the East, in which you imagine that the word God implies to the Eastern the same as it implies to you. Now that it is not so: The word that the Eastern uses for God is a word equivalent to your [42] “angel” or “archangel”, not the One Supreme Being whom you alone speak of under that name. When the Hindu speaks of the Deva so and so, it only means Shining One, the very word that John Bunyan applied to the angels in the Pilgrim's Progress. And if you want to be sure of that, let me - although later I shall be giving you some quotations that prove it to demonstration - quote but one single verse regarding this with a couple of verses before it that show the scope of the whole. A great Hindu philosopher in one of the Upanishads is said to have been asked by his wife to explain to her the Wisdom of the Self. “The Self” is the word used for the all-pervading, all-irradiating, all-vivifying, all-sustaining Life of God. He went on to explain it to her as the one Life of the Universe, and to tell her that all that there was of love and of beauty were but the scattered reflections of the one Self. And then he went on, in the words I want you to note:

Not for the sake of the husband is the husband dear, but for the sake of the Self is the husband dear;

Not for the sake of the wife is the wife dear, but for the sake of the Self is the wife dear;

Not for the sake of the son is the son dear, but for the sake of the Self is the son dear;

Not for the sake of the Gods are the Gods dear, but for the sake of the Self are the Gods dear.

I am using there the word “Gods” because that is the usual translation, but if you put the word “angels” you will have the idea of [43] the speaker. In all the manifestations of the one Life, husband, wife, son - and he gives many others that I did not quote - including those spiritual intelligences, the Shining Ones of higher worlds; those are only dear, only beautiful, only loving, because of the One all-pervading Life in whom alone they live.

That is the religious Pantheism, with which, as you see, what is called Polytheism goes. It is not the idea of a number of Gods, as you mostly think of it; it is the idea that in a world in which everything embodies the life of God, there is nothing existing that does not share in His beauty, in His strength, and in His life. When the Hindu wants to put his view of the place of the woman in the home, he says: “Thou art Lakshmi - the Goddess of prosperity - the Light and Goddess of the home”. He uses the word in order to point out that every form - human, animal, vegetable mineral, - is God-vivified, is an embodiment of the life of God. And so, as that Life is embodied in myriads of forms some of which as I said, you would speak of as ‘angel’ or ‘archangel’, God comes forth into His world so that He can appeal to the hearts of men, however ignorant, however degraded, however evil. And to the polytheist it is the life of God in the form, which to him is beautiful and fit to be worshipped. It is the idea that everything in the world has the life of God within it, and that we should recognise that [44] Life wherever it manifests itself in form. And so that Polytheism, which is Pantheism in action, irradiates the whole world with the splendour of a divine life, and there is no human activity, no human occupation, nothing that men can do of useful and of good, that has not the benediction of God behind it, in which man is not exercising a divine function, and bringing the life of God into the life of men.

And that is also true of the old Egyptian faith and the old Zoroastrian faith. They all see the world as much larger than the physical, inhabited by many grades of beings, some higher and some lower than man.

And as a child would ask his father to reach him down from the mantelshelf something that he is not yet tall enough to grasp for himself, and that prayer of the child to the father is not thought to touch the unity of God, and the help of the father to the child is not regarded as being against the laws of Nature; so the prayers of men to those above themselves in power and in helpfulness go up as the prayers of children to their fathers, asking for a help they themselves are unable to compass, and, as Sir Oliver Lodge has pointed out, there is nothing in that against the laws of Nature, but only a dependence and interdependence that spread throughout the whole of Nature which is animated by one divine life, in which the elders help the youngers and answer their requests. And [45] you can have your prayers answered either by knowledge, which subdues the laws of Nature to your purpose, or by an appeal to those Beings who are behind every natural force and every natural law, and who, for love’s sake, will help, and do constantly help, in the daily lives of men.

Leave for a moment those religions of which I have spoken, which I have glanced over in their national view and their general teaching, and come to the Hebrew faith, passing as it did through two remarkable and distinct phases. There again it is a national religion as all the religions of the past were national, very much in many ways to the benefit of the people; for where every nation had its own religion there was no need to go about making proselytes, and trying to convert a man of one nationality and of one faith to your faith; because they could then no more change faith than you could nationality without losing all that made them what they were, and so the world had much more religious peace than it has had in later days. Now in the Hebrew faith at first we find the God Idea was that of a national or tribal God, limited as you can see in the older books of the Hebrew Old Testament. Read Genesis, read any of the five books called Books of Moses, read the book of Joshua or read the book of Judges, and you will find quite clearly in these older remnants of the Hebrew scriptures that you are face to [46] face with a God who has many other Gods around him, and that superiority is claimed for him by his own nation and his own people. When you read in the third chapter of Genesis of God walking in the garden in the cool of the day, or when you read of the Tower of Babel, when the people were going to build up a tower that was to reach unto Heaven, and God said if they did that there was nothing they would not be able to do; so he went down among them and confounded their speech, so that they should not be able to understand each other; when you read in the Book of Judges that the Lord was with Judah, and he drove out the inhabitants of the valley but could not drive out those of the mountain because they had chariots of iron - when you read things like that, you realise at once that you are in the presence of a conception of God which is local and national, and you realise that many of the commands that were given to inflict the most cruel and brutal punishments upon the Jew who turned renegade to his faith were chiefly intended to preserve the Jews as a nation, for it was treason that was punished; for to dally with any other form of religion was really treason, as the Gods of the nations around them were enemies of their own God, and therefore to turn to them was treason to the State belonging to the tribal or national God. And that view continued till the Captivity: then the [47] Jews were carried out into the ancient civilisations, Assyrians, Babylonians, etc. And when they come back again to Judea you find that in the remnant that returns the God Idea has assumed a wider, greater, and far more splendid form. They bring back with them the idea of immortality; they bring back with them the idea of one God, the universal, the all-pervading. You have such a splendid; phrase as that spoken in the Psalms, in a post-Babylonian Psalm: “Whither shall I go from Thy Spirit, or whither shall I flee from Thy presence? If I ascend up into heaven, thou art there: if I make my bed in hell, behold thou art there. If I take the wings of the morning and dwell in the utter most parts of the sea, even there shall thy hand lead me, and thy right hand shall hold me”. There is nothing like that in the older books, no conception of that thought until the post-Babylonian days; and then instead of the God who walked m the garden in the cool of the day you have “the high and lofty One who inhabiteth eternity, whose Name is Holy”. The splendour of that phrase ‘who inhabiteth eternity’ is separated by an age of thinking from the conception of the God who walked in a little garden - utterly different; a sublimely spiritual idea instead of a local and a material one.

And then you pass on to the God-Ideas that are found in what we may call the [48] universal religions: Buddhism, Christianity, Islam, the three comparatively modern religions of the world. They are not national; there are no limitations in them to a special form of social order intended for the development of a particular nation; they can pass from one nation to another and be adapted to any civilisation into which they come. Now in southern Buddhism there cannot be said to be any Idea of God. In northern Buddhism you find the Idea of God again appearing as the celestial Buddha, the boundless Buddha, but in the southern church it is the Lord Buddha Himself who is the object of worship, to whom flowers are brought, to whom love goes out, the Man who has risen into God.

When you take Christianity, there you have as the central God-Idea the Idea of the Father of Spirits. That is one of the great contributions of Christianity to the religious thought of the world, a universal Father, who is really the Father of men. But in Christianity itself you have a trace of Pantheism more than once, as you must have in all religion that seeks to be reasonable, philosophic, intelligible. You read in one of the Epistles of S. Paul the statement, after saying that all things are to be subdued to the Son: “Then shall the Son Himself be subject to Him who put all things under Him, that God may be all in all”. You find the same thought [49] coming out when it is declared: “In Him we live and move and have our being”. And while it is true that, owing to many historical conditions and the gradual growth of civilisation out of the darkness which followed the destruction of the Roman Empire up to our own time, that deeper doctrine of Pantheism has been overlaid and you only find it now and again in some lecture delivered philosophically to philosophers, as by Mansell, where he finds himself landed, as he says, in the pathless desert of Pantheism, led there by his reason which finds it impossible to deny; that side is left out entirely in popular Christianity, and the conception of the Father is the one most dwelt upon, with those other aspects of deity in the Son and the creative intelligent Spirit.

When you come to Islam, there the God-Idea is more the Monarch than the Father, rather the Ruler of nations than the Lover of men. I am not forgetting that there are some most exquisite statements as to the love of God in Islam from the mouth of the great Prophet himself, as well as from the mouths of some of his followers; but the main conception, the conception that dominates popular Islam, is rather the idea of the mighty Ruler, the one supreme authority, than the nearer and tenderer conception you find in Christianity as coming from the mouth of the Christ. And never forget, when you think of Him as God, that He recalled to the men of His day according [50] to the account which is left of Him, that older conception of the Hebrew faith, calling all the sons of God. “I said: Ye are Gods and ye are all the children of the Highest”.

Passing again from that brief sketch of these three universal religions, separating them for the sake of clearness from the older national religions of the past, and reminding you that there were of course many other national religions, although I only spoke specifically of the three fundamental faiths that branch out into others, let me ask you now to turn for a moment to the highest conception of God, the God-Idea at its noblest and its greatest, as it comes out in the great religions of the world belonging to the Aryan race and its branches as far as they have spread. I am using here for convenience sake a little book compiled by myself and issued by the Theosophical Society, the first part of the Universal Text-Book of Religion, and although I am using this for quotations, I may say that all the quotations were taken by me and others from the originals or translations, and have very carefully been left in their own complete sense, so that you should be able to judge of the teachings of the religions of the world, arranged as they are here under the heads of the great doctrines. I am taking here those which are put under The Unity of God, in order to put to you those great central Ideas of God, so [51] marvellously alike, so sublimely spiritual, as we find them in the greatest of our race. I take first only the oldest, drawn from the Hindu scriptures:

“I will declare that which is to be known, that which being known immortality is gained, the beginningles supreme Brahman.”

That, remember, is the Hindu name for the supreme God, “the One only without a second”, and then a description comes from a Upanishat:

“Unseen He sees, unheard He hears, unthought of He thinks, unknown He knows; none other than He is the Seer, none other than He is the Hearer, none other than He is the Thinker, none other than He is the Knower; He is the Self, the Inner Ruler, immortal, that which is other perishes.”

“I am the Self, seated in the heart of all beings; I am the beginning, the middle and also the end of all beings … nor is there ought moving or unmoving that may exist bereft of Me. … Whatsoever is glorious good, beautiful and mighty, understand thou that to come forth from a fragment of my splendour. … Having pervaded this whole universe with one fragment of myself, I remain.”

“When darkness was not, when there was neither day nor night, neither being nor non-being, then there the All-Blessed even alone. None is able to comprehend Him in the space above, in the space below, in the space between. For Him whose name is infinite glory there is no likeness. Not in the sight [52] abides His form; none beholds Him with the eye; those who by love and wisdom know Him as dwelling in the heart, they become immortal.”

There you have the Hindu Idea of God, not, I think, surpassable in magnificence in any scripture or in any thought. And that has permeated the Indian people, is familiar to the peasant even as it is thought of by the philosopher.

“Manifest, near, dwelling verily in the heart, is the great goal; on Him is founded all that moves, breathes and closes the eyes. Him you know as what exists and exists not, who is to be adored, who is beyond the knowledge of creatures, who is greatest. Luminous, more subtle than the subtle, on whom the worlds are founded and their inhabitants.”

“He is great, divine, of a nature not to be conceived by thinking, more subtle than the subtle; He shines in many ways; He is more distant than the distant, and also near in this body; for the open eyed He dwelleth here, even in the heart. He is not apprehended by the eye, nor by speech, nor by the other senses, nor by devotion nor rites, but he whose reason is purified by the light of wisdom, he by meditation beholds Him who is partless.”

Now there is no reasonable challenge as to the most modern date that can be given to these. The Zoroastrians that followed them are said by a great Orientalist of the West to go back to some five thousand years before the Christian era; and how much beyond these writings go no historian may dare definitely to say. Two only of these quotations were taken from a comparatively modern scripture, though still one which is thousands [53] of years old, the Bhagavad-Gita. The rest were taken from the Upanishats, which are of unknown antiquity.

Now if you take the Zoroastrian faith, you find there an idea that later appears in the Hebrew:

“My first name is Ahmi - I am. Thou, first great Thinker, whose splendour pervades all light, who through His intellect is the Creator of all, who supports righteousness and the good mind. Thou Spirit Mazda, Thou who art ever the same. His origin, none can know, except Himself, who can comprehend him? He is living and wise and powerful and independent and just; His knowledge extends over all that is heard or seen or that exists. All existence is visible to His knowledge at once, without time, and from Him nothing is hid.”

In the earlier Hebrew period there is only one passage that touches this loftier view; in Exodus: “I am that I am”, the statement of pure existence. The fundamental truth, the unity, is loudly proclaimed: “Hear, O Israel, the Lord our God is one Lord”. But later on you find the lofty idea: “I am the Lord and there is none else. There is no God beside me”. “The Lord is the true God, He is the living God and a King of Eternity.” “He is the living God and steadfast for ever; and His kingdom that which shall not be destroyed and His dominion shall be even unto the end.” There the wider, nobler idea appears.

Then when you come to the Christian religion, you have the phrase in the Acts: [54] “He is not far from any one of us, for in Him we live and move and have our being. As certain also of your own poets have said, We are also his offspring, . . . We are the offspring of God”. And you get also there a splendid ascription: “Now unto the King Eternal, Immortal, Invisible, the only wise God, be honour and glory for ever and ever”.

And when you come to Islam, here we are suffering somewhat from the badness of translation, for the great book of Islam has never been translated by a believer in Islam, as it should be, and therefore you have difficulty. But still even through the wooden translation you can catch the splendour of one of the passages from the Quran: “God, there is no God but He, the ever-living, the ever-subsisting. Slumber seizeth Him not nor sleep. To Him belongeth whatsoever is in heaven and on earth. Who is he that should intercede with Him unless by His permission? He knows what has been before them, and what shall be after them, and they shall not compass aught of His knowledge save what He willeth. His throne is extended over the heavens and the earth, and the care of them burdeneth Him not, for He is the High, the Mighty”.

And when you come to the teachings of the Prophet, as preserved in his sayings translated by one of his own people, you have some beautiful conceptions of the Nature of God:

“Whoso seeketh to approach me one span I seek to [55] approach one cubit; whoso seeketh to approach him two fathoms, and whoso walketh towards Me, I run towards him.”

“God saith: O man, only follow thou my laws and thou shalt become like unto Me, and then thou shalt say ‘Be’, and behold it is.”

“The person I hold as a beloved, I am his hearing by which he heareth; I am his sight by which he seeth; I am his hands by which he holdeth; I am his feet by which he walketh.”

“There was God when there was nothing. He knoweth all things before and after their existence. He is light without darkness, life without death, knowledge without ignorance. As He is today so He will remain for ever.”

Now those are but a few of the God Ideas, as you find them in the scriptures of the world, the higher of course - deliberately taken out of the highest and the noblest, for the highest is the test of all religions and not their lowest, as they are lived out by ignorant and foolish men.

And I submit to you that brief testimony, and you can multiply it a hundredfold if you will. Read your own scriptures at length, and not only these little jewels that I have picked out in order to show you specimens of the wealth that those religions contain; and you will realise that you only want one thing, which comes out so strongly in the Hindu quotations, in order to turn those loftiest ideas into the Mystical Idea of God. You notice how over and over again, when speaking of God as distant, He is also spoken of as near, and then it is ever said he dwelleth in [56] the heart. It is in the heart that the Mystic sees Him. For if there is One life and only One life without a second, then your lives and mine, however poor and weak and childish and undeveloped they may be, are the Life of God Himself, and all that He is we can from within ourselves unfold. “The kingdom of God is within you” quoth the Christ, the great revealer of God to the western world. It is in your own hearts, in the depths of your own being, in the profoundest depths of your own existence, that you must seek if you would find and know the God whose knowledge is Eternal Life. If you cannot find Him there, you will never be sure of Him anywhere. But if once you catch a glimpse of the Eternal within you, then the Eternal around you will shine out clearly before your eyes. And think what that means of strength and of splendour to every one of you who has found out by direct knowledge that God is hiding within you, as He is manifest in the wondrous life of the wondrous universe around you. Nature is but a veil behind which is shining the eternal smile of God.

And think what it means if Nature is to you not a soulless mechanism but a living organism; if God is no longer an abstraction of theology but a Living Spirit, the Friend and the Lover of Men; if He is no longer to you a Name but is a Life. That is the glory of the Mystic; that is the joy of the one who [57] knows. Wherever you go you see Him shining; wherever you look you recognise the traces of His being. You look at the wonder of Nature spreading out before you and in the whole of that manifested beauty, as in the tiniest fragment that you can take in your hand, you see it all irradiated by the Perfect Beauty that is God. You see Him in the blue of the sky or the ocean; you see him in the radiant snow on the mountain peak; you hear Him singing in every bird; you see Him smiling in every flower; and most of all you see Him in the heart and in the intellect and in the love of men. You see Him in the love of the mother for the babe; you see Him in the love of the youth for the maiden; you see Him in the strength of the athlete; you see Him in the patience of the saint; you see Him in the righteousness of the most holy, and you see Him hiding in the heart of the basest, illuminating it now and then with some touch of human love, which is the nearest of all things to God, whose very Nature is Love and Bliss.

Do you wonder then that anyone of us who has caught but one glimpse of that infinite and splendid beauty that enwraps the worlds, longs that all others should likewise catch if it be but a passing glimpse of that supernal beauty? for what can there be of fear and grief to those who know, of their own knowledge, that God is, and that the Self of All is One? [58]

Perhaps the most attractive idea in almost all the religions of the world is the idea of the Divine Man, whether that Divine Man be brought into existence by the ascent of man into God, or by the descent of God into man.

Last Sunday, after reviewing the idea of God as it appeared in many nations, as it was taught in many religions, we found that the essence of those ideas, the substance which underlay them, was gathered up and rendered yet more splendid, summed up in the Mystical Idea.

So with what I have called the Christ Idea, using the phrase most familiar in the West, the idea of the God Man, the Divine Man, as practically the central object of worship. That also I want to trace for you through various faiths, catching the light which is thrown upon it in the different conceptions [59] which have been held from time to time in many nations in many ages of the world. And there again we shall find that this same idea, put in varied forms, is summed up and rendered still more beautiful, still more practical, when we take it in the light of Mysticism, and realise that the story of one God Man, of one Christ, is in its deepest, truest meaning the evolution of Divinity in every child of man. And it is really to that thought we are finally led when we are studying the main religious conceptions, as we find them in the history of the great faiths of the world, as we see them reappearing millenium after millenium in the story of the experiences of the human soul.

And so there gradually grows upon us, as we follow the study, the idea of a wonderful unity, the thought of world conceptions embodied in a particular form in each religious faith; and the outcome of it is, I think, a profounder faith which grows out of the wider knowledge, a realisation that that which in all times and in all countries has satisfied the yearning Spirit in man must exemplify a profound spiritual reality, must be found in Nature itself when studied by the spiritual vision.

Now, so far as I know, in the great faiths of the world, two alone are without the conception of the God Man as a central object of worship. We do not find it in the popular

[60] Hebrew faith. I am obliged to put in the word ‘popular’ because, in the more mystical writings of the Hebrews, there are naturally traces of this same spiritual fact; but owing very largely, I think, to the sense among the Hebrew teachers that the people were in danger of falling away from their national God into various forms of idolatry, it seems that all image or likeness, even the human itself, was excluded from their larger conception of Deity. In their mystical writings, as I say, you find traces of that, traces which are drawn partly from the verse in Genesis when it is said that ‘in the image of God made He man’.

The other faith which is without the notion of the God Man is, of course, the faith of Islam. And there it is very easy to see why the great Prophet of Arabia left entirely on one side all conception of humanity when he was founding and building his religion. You cannot study the history of the time in which Islam was founded without seeing how the popular ideas of God and of Christ had become debased and repellent. And founded also, as that faith was, in the midst of peculiarly brutal forms of idolatry, it was probably thought necessary by the insight of the Prophet to put forth a faith entirely free from all conception of humankind as entering into the Godhead.

In both those cases it would seem that surrounding necessities veiled what in other faiths [61] was one of the central religious conceptions. And putting those two aside and turning to the other great faiths, whether national or world-wide, we shall find that in the centre of each of them this idea of the God Man shines out luminous and supreme. We see that the human heart turns to that conception of deity, finding God in the familiar and beloved form of man; that man, in his longing for sympathy, asks for a manhood which would be able to feel with human feelings, in which the human heart shall ever throb; and we shall find that all the tenderest love and the most reverential homage is offered up to that manhood taken into God. We shall see that, in times of sorrow and distress as well as in times of rejoicing, the human sought the human in Deity, m order that the sense of sympathy and of kinship might arise. And that is justified when we realise that in every child of man God is incarnate, and that man was really following the deepest promptings of the Spirit when, not yet perchance recognising his own divinity, he yet sought in human symbol and in human likeness to find the thought of God that must sustain and console.

Now everywhere, of course, there is one form of this, less exalted than the one that I have called the Christ Idea, which you find in Greek and Roman and Hindu story, - the idea of the demigod. That is mostly interesting, from the standpoint of comparative [62] religion, in that, when you come to the God Men themselves, you see that this same thought of the absence of a human father is prominent in every one of them. The demigods of Greece and Rome, the demigods of the more ancient Hindus, were men living amongst men and taking active part in human affairs; they were kings, they were warriors, they were statesmen, sometimes they were teachers. And you cannot read a great epic poem of Greece or of India without finding very many cases in which a God overshadowed an earthly maiden, and became the father of a hero, the ruler, the warrior, who was to play a great part in the history of his country. That idea of the demigod is allied to some thoughts of the great Incarnation which, under many names in other religions, is signified in Christianity by the name of Christ, and it has, it is true, in common with these legends, the thought that no earthly father is the parent of the Divine Child. But that is rather a side issue.

The real interest in the two conceptions is that, wherever you get the thought of the demigod, you are there concerned with a religion which has adopted that religious polytheism of which I spoke in the second lecture, in which the pantheism of the religion has, for the sake of worship, for the sake of attracting and helping men and women, veiled itself in the form of mighty spiritual intelligences called ‘gods’ among the Greeks and [63] the Romans, called ‘Shining Ones’ among the Hinds, the phrase analogous to the thought of the ‘angel’ or ‘archangel’ in the Christian scriptures. And it is not without interest in this connection to remember that verse over which so much dispute and so much controversy have arisen, that you find in Genesis, when it is said that “the sons of God saw the daughters of men that they were fair and took them wives of all whom they chose”. Some commentators tell us that those are the angels who came down and wedded with mortal women, but, however that be, whatever was in the mind of the Hebrew writer, it is a thought that we find over and over again in the literature of the ancient world, and always in connection with the faiths where the Supreme Deity is regarded as incarnating in all the forms in his universe, so that what the Christian calls the angel, the spiritual intelligence, is one that occupies a large part in the life of the people. And there is an intimacy, as it were, of connection between the two; taking interest in human affairs on the divine side, looking up to the Divine Helper on the human side; so that life becomes permeated with the idea of super-physical existences and all Nature becomes irradiated with God in many forms. But, apart from that, these demigods are not interesting to us in our search after the larger idea of the God Man, which is signified, for [64] the sake of intelligibility here, by the great name of the Christ.

In taking that larger thought, turn for a moment first to Buddhism, not because Buddhism is first in time, of course, for the religions of the Hindus and of the Persians - the Zoroastrians, - are much older in time than the Buddhist; but because in that we find put forward so clearly and so beautifully the thought of the way in which man evolves into Divinity, in which the perfect Divine life is reached m human form. Of course in Buddhism you have as a fundamental idea the thought of Reincarnation, and so when the Buddha has reached Illumination, has in fact become the Buddha, we find in the stories of which Easterns are so fond - the Jatakas or birth stories, as they are called - sayings of the Lord reported which speak of former lives, lives traced even from the animal kingdom, in which the far-reaching vision of the perfectly illuminated Man looked backward over the uncounted aeons of the past, and saw the Spirit within Him climbing up the many steps of the great ladder that leads from the mineral up to God. You find Him speaking of Himself as a tiger, speaking of Himself under other animal forms, and then speaking of His human births, of life after life, birth and death after birth and death, until the time comes - ages, uncounted ages before the era of Buddhahood - when it [65] is said that He took the vow to be a Saviour of the world. And then it is written that He perfected His vow age after age, until He came at length to His last mortal birth.

Now the idea of the evolution of a Buddha has, as its starting point, a man who, moved by sympathy for the sorrow of the world and desiring, under an impulse of perfect compassion, to lessen the world’s miseries, comes into touch with the Buddha of the time, to whom he offers his vow that he also will give himself to become saviour of the world as He is. That is a necessary step in the long evolution, the starting point, we may say, of the life of a Buddha. And then there is necessary the acceptance of the offer, the confirmation by the One who has trodden the Path, who has attained Illumination, who is living His last life as man, and who, on death, will pass onwards into Nirvana. That mighty Being accepts the vow that a successor in the future offers to Him, moved by the impulse which long ages before He also had felt, the vow He also had offered. And then, in the acceptance of the vow, it is held that the first step towards Buddhahood is taken. Life after life he passes onwards, marked by an ever-growing width of sympathy, an ever-growing depth of compassion; and then there is some division between the views held by the two great branches of the Buddhist Church. Some say He enters on the Path, [66] and that is also the Occult view; others say that He stands aside through many lives, gradually perfecting the human nature, but does not pass through the definite Initiations intended for other lines of work. It matters not much which view is held. The Occult view, as I say, is that He passes through Initiation after Initiation, until He has reached the stage of Liberation that we call the Master; then onwards and onwards still, until He becomes the holder of that great office, the name of which will be familiar to you, the office of the Bodhisattva, He “whose essence is Wisdom”; and finally, He leaves the body, for the last time, and passes away from earth. The One who is next to Him in the order of evolution along these lines takes then the place of the Bodhisattva which the first, in becoming the Buddha, has left vacant. This is the name by which, in Buddhist countries, the Supreme Teacher of the world is indicated, the One who, at each new stage of civilisation, enters into a human body in order to give the new spiritual impulse, in order to give the principle on which that civilisation will be founded, and by which it will be developed. He comes time after time to found a new religion, embodying in the religion the central idea which is to dominate the civilisation; coming thus out into the world; time after time, when the new impulse is needed, when a new division of the great [67] race - a sub-race - is to be born; then taking a human body - generally the body of a disciple - He lives on earth, teaching and proclaiming the ancient truths in the new garb which is suited for the time, to give the necessary impulse for the new spiritual life; and then, passing back to where He was before, leaves another to look after the religion He has founded, Himself the Guide of every faith on earth, the Supreme Teacher. He loves all the religions he has founded, and ever pours down into them the floods of His spiritual life. When His work is over, when a great race has reached the point at which another new departure is to be taken, then, for the last time this Bodhisattva also comes into the World as mortal man. Then He passes through the hard stages that you may read in the story of the life of the Lord Gautama, the last Buddha, and finally he reaches that perfect illumination which enables Him to open before the men of the coming ages the ancient Path, with new instructions to make the treading of the Path clearer in the eyes of the people of His day. And you find Him then proclaiming the ancient law, you find Him then establishing the ancient order, and giving to the world that law, pointing that noble Path to the people of His time. Then He passes away from earth for the last time through the gateway of death, and becomes the spiritual Buddha, [68] parted from the earth He has served, so far as further physical manifestation is concerned.

And along that line, as you know, the great Buddhist religion has been built up. They tell us that when the Lord Buddha passed away, it was a brother of His - not a physical Brother, but a Brother who had trodden with Him the great Path through many ages - the Lord Maitreya, the Lord of Compassion, who took His place m the seat of the Supreme Teacher. The Bodhisattva of our own time, then, is this Supreme Teacher, known in the East under that name of the Compassionate One, far Gautama the Buddha is ever called the Buddha of Wisdom, while Maitreya, the Buddha-to-be, is called the Buddha of Compassion.

And so you find in that ancient faith this climbing up of man into perfection, as the idea of the World Teacher that rules the minds of myriads of men who call themselves by the name of the Lord Buddha.

In the Hindu religion, on the other hand, you find the supreme manifestation of God more closely allied to your Christian idea, for there the Avatara is representative of the same Christ thought. He is one who descends from Deity into manhood, he does not climb from manhood into God. The normal orthodox idea is that from time to time, from the second Person of the Hindu [69] Trinity, there comes forth a fragment, as it were, of God Himself, who descends into the world of men and becomes in that world a Saviour and a Teacher. Ten of those great descents (the words Avatara only means descent) are spoken of in the Hindu scriptures. Nine are of the past; one more is to come in some hundreds of thousands of years from the present time. Nothing short of that is spoken of as a great Avatara. The word would be utterly out of place, and would only show ignorance, were it used to indicate a teacher of the world who was not God Himself descending into humanity.

But there is one peculiarity of the Hindu faith that I ought to mention to you in regard to these Avataras; they mark out the great epochs of evolution in a very, very remarkable way; for when you remember that these are found in some of the most ancient Hindu writers, it may strike you as strange, if you have not reached the idea that universal religion is of unknown antiquity, and that the Hindu faith is the oldest of living faiths; it may strike you as strange that in these Avataras you have the order of evolution as recognised by science, marked out by symbol and by word. You have to remember that to the mind of the Hindu God is everywhere and in everything, otherwise it may seem to you perchance grotesque as symbol, but not so to the Hindu. The first Avatara is in the form [70] of a fish, the second of a tortoise, the third of a boar, then of a half-human half-animal figure, then of man himself. Put those side by side with evolution as seen by science and you will see how the first is the symbol of the time when water covered the earth and nought but the great fish kingdom could exist; you come on to the reptiles, the amphibious creatures, typified in the tortoise; then to the mammals, typified in the boar; then to the semi-human, typified in the man-lion; then to the human, typified first in the dwarf and then in a full-grown man. And not until all those stages have been traced, everyone of which is due to a new impulse of the ever evolving life of God, do you come to the two great Ones who dominate Hindu India - Rama, the perfect King, and Krishna, the perfect object of devotion. Those two Avataras are the examples of the Hindu, just as among you the Christ is taken for an example, “having left you an example that you should follow in His steps”. In those two marvellous Divine-human figures, all that you can think of most splendid in power, most magnificent in justice, greatest in rule; the idea of the perfect King is embodied in Rama; in Krishna all that you can think of that is tenderest in love, all that you can imagine is fairest in childhood, joyous and glad, with the flute ever playing divine music to which the very beasts of the field came, [71] attracted by the marvellous notes, the God enshrined in the heart of every woman in India who follows the Hindu faith, the God of the home, the God of the child - that is Shri Krishna to the myriads who bow down to Him, all in men most gracious and most tender, all that most divinely images, embodies a perfect childhood and a perfect youth, the ideal and the loved of the Hindu heart.

Then you come, as ninth, to the Lord Buddha, accepted as Avatara by the Hindu as by the Buddhist, only now as a descent from God, not as an ascent from man; but He, they say, was the Avatara for the non Hindu nations, not intended for the Hindu but for nations outside India.

The tenth, as I said, is yet to come, hundred of thousands of years from the present time. Now that idea of Shri Rama and Shri Krishna is the one most closely related, I think, to the Christ Incarnation, and it is remarkable that in one form of the narrative, the stories of them come very nearly side by side.

But if you look in other faiths as well, in Egypt you have Osiris; you have among the Persians Mithra, and in many other nations similar Divine men, joined together by the stories of their lives which, as we shall see in a moment, are closely connected with the story of the sun’s course through the year.

Then, thus descending to the later faith, we find the idea of the Christ the central thought [72] in Christianity; for after all it is not too much to say that the heart of the Christian goes out to Christ as it does not go out to the others who are called the first and the third Persons in the Christian Trinity. Now that is the same in Hinduism; the Hindu Vishnu is the second Person in the Hindu Trinity, as the Son is the second in the Christian. The first in that Trinity, while He attracts the Yogi, the philosopher, does not attract similarly the love of the ordinary devotee, while the third Person of the Trinity in Hinduism, like the third Person in the Christian Trinity, can scarcely be said to be an object of worship at all. Both recognise the Creative Spirit as an aspect in the Trinity, but you find no temples to Brahma in India - save one I think that has been discovered - and you find but little worship of the Holy Spirit in the Christian churches, although one day is specially set apart to reverence Him.

Coming then to this Christ idea in Christianity, I want you, if you will and if you can, to realise that what that idea in experience and in beauty is to you, so is the idea of the Buddha to the Buddhist, so is the idea of Shri Rama and Shri Krishna to the Hindu; and that from the traces of faiths now dead we can see that to the Egyptians Osiris represented the same beloved idea of God and man united. And it is not to be forgotten that the Egyptian dead was said to “become [73] Osiris” just as the Christian thinks of his beloved dead being united to Christ. These great ideas are one; they are not an appanage of any one special faith; they reappear in every religion, and so prove the reality of the truth of the idea that underlies them. If you can cease to be exclusive with your treasures, you will find that they only become the more precious and the more your own, when you realise that other religions also have had the same delight in their conceptions, and that which is universally found may be expected to be true.

Thinking now for a moment of that one great Being who in the West is spoken of as the Christ, He is regarded by all who have gone deeply into these matters as the Supreme Teacher of all the religions of the world. Put in another phrase, that Mighty One whom you speak of as the Christ is the same individual as the Buddhist speaks of as the Bodhisattva. You are worshipping the same individual, although perhaps most in both the religions would feel offended at the idea. When talking not very long ago with a Buddhist monk, I told him that the Bodhisattva - the Lord Maitreya - was the same as the Christian Lord Christ, and he was shocked at the idea; to him it was a blasphemy; just as it may be to some of you but a blasphemy to think that the One whom you reverence as the Christ is worshipped under another name in eastern [74] lands. But to me, it is one of the most beautiful of things to think that the millions of the Buddhist world who bow the knee to the Bodhisattva send up their love and their prayers to the same mighty Being as the One to whom the millions of Christendom bow down in homage. To realise that both are worshipping the same mighty One seems to me so fair a thing; religions are nearer than they dream, and worshippers are joined in prayers although distinct in the names to which those prayers are addressed. Surely it is a greater thing, a gladder thing, to know that your Christ is worshipped by myriads who have never heard His Name; for to Him all prayers to the God-Man go up, and it matters not whether they name the Lord Maitreya, the Lord Krishna, the Lord Christ; they are but three names of One who presides over all, and who leads His children, to whatever faith they belong. Was it not the Christ Himself who said: “Other sheep I have that are not of this fold; them also I must bring and they shall hear My voice; and there shall be one fold and one shepherd?” There is one Shepherd in the higher world, though there are many folds in the one of division which is our earth; but the one Shepherd shall draw them all together, for they know His voice and shall surely learn to know each other.

And now think for a moment of him in [75] His historical aspect. The Christ in all times and in all ages has stood out as man in two characters - one as Teacher, the other as what is called Miracl