Superhuman Men

I ought almost, I think, to begin with an apology for offering to you a very large subject in a most imperfect form. I had planned to place before you the whole question of Super-­human Beings manifested in our world in a course of six lectures, so to some extent perhaps touching on the main points of the subject, and making intelligible possibly to you some of the obscurities of the past. I have been com­pelled, not by my own will, to change the course of six lectures in London into two, and I can only try to place before you tonight something of the general forms of manifestations and of the great realities that lie behind those forms, and then, next Sunday evening, to point you to the future rather than to the past. Basing [1] upon what has happened in the past the possi­bilities of the future, I shall try to indicate to you some of the greatest of those possibilities, the restoration to our world and to religion of those great Mysteries which have ever been the life of religion in the past, openly in its life during thousands and tens of thousands of years, existing still today, although withdrawn from the common knowledge of men, to come back to our world as soon as men are ready for and desire their restoration. For ever the barrier between the spiritual and the physical does not lie in the spiritual world; it lies in the physical world, the habitation of mortal men; for the life of the Spirit, which exists in forth­-giving, is ever striving to pour itself into our mortal world; but we erect barriers, we create obstacles, we hinder the free flow of that beneficent, that glorious life. Only as we build up in ourselves the spiritual vessels that are able to receive it, will the old stream of spiritual life pour forth again abundantly upon our world, not only on individuals who prepare themselves for its reception, but on the great masses of those who follow the religions of the world, on the great masses of all who seek to make their life serviceable to their generation, to the world in which they are.

But for this evening our eyes turn backwards to the past, seeking whether in that past we can find any guarantee of the hope which gleams in the future. Now, as we turn back the pages [2] of history we find civilisation after civilisation succeeding each other. Students of ancient literature, students of those old books which have come down from a past which seems to us perchance hidden in the night of time, have found records of civilisations mighty and great, apparently permanent and secure, but which have so utterly passed away from ordinary human thought that in modern days men dis­believed in their existence, and thought the stories in the ancient books were but legends, fables created by national pride in order to  glorify their own past, not records of historical facts, not pictures of civilisations that really  existed on our earth. These ancient books, it is true, were corroborated now and again by what is called occult research. Men and women who had developed in themselves certain powers not yet general in our race have claimed that by the exercise of those powers they could read records of the past existing as pictures in matter subtler than the physical, as men with physical eyes can read the printed page. But in a time like our own, when Occultism is only now beginning to make its way among men, an age in which Mysticism until lately was regarded, in the high opinion of the Times newspaper, as an “exploded  superstition”, so that it marvelled that a man so eminent as the Dean of St Paul’s should think it worth while in the twentieth century to give lectures on such a superstition; in our [3] age, when Occultism and Mysticism are again beginning to claim the attention of the thought­ful and the earnest, there is more probability as the years roll on that the records of the past, as read by the Occultist, will again take their place as subjects of study among men. Until quite lately - nay, I hardly know whether I dare say until - those records have been scoffed at by the foolish, have been ignored by the learned; but, as you know, during the last half, and even more, of the nineteenth century, a new light came into the arena of human thought, and antiquarian research, spreading widely and digging deeply, began to unveil fragments whose existence could not be denied, fragments of ancient civilisations. And step by step as archaeology advanced, step by step as ex­cavation succeeded excavation, it was found that physical research was confirming the legends of the ancient literature, was verifying many a statement made by occult research­ - stories of such a one as King Minos of Crete, stories of such a one as Menes of Egypt, stories running back into ancient Babylon.

Those were brought to the light of day, not in ways that could be challenged, not in forms that could be denied, but in matter solid enough to knock a man down with, so that a man could be sure that it existed - in libraries made of ancient tiles which had long outlived their makers, in fragments of ancient architecture from city after city buried one below the other, [4] and each succeeding city shut off from its predecessors by ruins, by solid earth which intervened between each pair. In these ways, ever being confirmed by new investigations, by these physical methods which appeal to the physical mind of men, the existence of those old civilisations was proved, and none now ventures to deny that well-nigh endless past of civilised man.

One thing came out strongly, a surprise to the thinkers of the last century. Quite natur­ally, the great doctrine of Evolution applied to human history resulted in a certain theoretical building up of the past which appealed to the human mind and seemed logical and even necessary. The elder amongst you must remember how we read of the growth of civilisation, how we were told of families of savages who joined together into tribes, of tribes who linked themselves together into communities for mutual assistance and defence, of communities building themselves up into nations, and so on step by step, millennium after millennium, until from barbarism civilisa­tion arose, just as in the corresponding domain of religion the ideas of the savage, the animistic ideas of the barbarians, were held to be the origin, the source, of all the religions of the world. But, however natural that view was, it was found not to square with facts. None had discovered in the excavations of the past those infant civilisations whose remnants might [5] naturally have been looked for, building up step by step in successive excavations. Savages have been found, cave men have been discovered, villages built on piles have been unveiled, but between those and the civilisations there is no steady advance or link which science has dis­covered. Savages exist today side by side with great civilisations; they existed also in the past; but between them no bridges have been found. On the contrary, it has been seen everywhere, as facts have been accumulated, that what Bunsen has said of Egypt only is true of all the great civilisations of the past. You may remember how he declared of the civilisation of Egypt that it had no origin which human wit could find, that it seemed to spring upon the stage of history complete as Minerva burst from the head of Jove. It was thought at first to be a marvel and a wonder, to be unique in the story of man, but every great civilisation shows the same marvellous charac­teristic, that it appears as a mighty civilisation. Even though traces of a child-people can be found under the great Rulers and Teachers of the past, more and more through the twilight, in the dawning of history, great figures stand out grandiose and mighty, over-topping the con­temporary people, the Rulers, the Teachers, and the Guides of men; They the founders of the mighty civilisations, They the architects of the marvellous buildings, They the teachers of the child-humanity, the Superhuman Beings [6] who are the builders of civilisations and of religions in our world. Plenty of civilisations have been traced through the period of their decay - a significant fact; none has ever been traced through its building up from the savage state into the state of the highly organised and civil­ised nation. As we look at these great civilisa­tions and see how the masses of the people in them were as children intellectually and spiritu­ally, but children ready to be taught, children willing to be guided, loving, not hating their  superiors, and reverencing, not being jealous of those who knew more than themselves; as we  see that unrolled in the story of the past, two great types appear: the Ruler and the Teacher in these most ancient States; Builders of races, Builders of sub-races, Builders of nations and  polities; Teachers who give forms for the eternal truths of religion, shaping them in different forms according to the needs of those  to whom they gave this ever-new presentation of ancient truth.

The Ruler, the typical Man, He is concerned with the building up of the outer civilisations, with the shaping of social polity, with the laying down of laws by which the people must develop, must evolve. He has to do not only with racial types, not only with national polities, but also with the great seismic changes which go side by side with evolution of new races. Take as types of what the Theosophist means when he speaks of a Root Race, the two great types [7] so familiar to you that we call the fourth and fifth; typical examples of the fourth in the Chinese and Japanese, typical examples of the fifth in the Indian and the European. If you put those two side by side you see at once what I mean by the fundamental difference of Races; difference in outer features, difference in nervous system, showing distinctions so deeply wrought into the physical frame that confusion between them is utterly impossible, and a child would distinguish between those I have mentioned, which we call the fourth and fifth of human Root Races. Smaller differences, but yet clearly marked, until by intermarriages the characteristics have been more or less blended, you find in the sub-divisions, to which we give the name of sub-races. Now the great Ruler is connected with the racial type. His task to build out of a previous Race the new Race which is to succeed it in leading the evolution of humanity; His task to prepare for the new Race He has builded the continent on which that Race shall develop, to which in time it shall be led in order that its evolution may proceed. And without delaying - for we have not time to delay upon it - on the interesting geological questions of the existence of a great physical continent to which the name of Lemuria has been given, or the great Atlantic continent known as Atlantis, only reminding you that these are subjects that are being discussed by scientists and not only by Theosophists, we [8] find that the world as it is today is the world ruled by the later Race, by the various sub-races of the fifth, and we see in these distinct types the work of a great Builder, the Builder of the outer evolution as well as of nations, and of social organisms; and to Him the name has ever been given from which ‘man’ is derived,  the word Manu - the man, the typical man, the thinker, inasmuch as thought is that which differentiates the human being from his lower brethren of the animal and vegetable kingdoms.

Side by side with that we find the World Teacher, as we often call Him, the supreme Teacher concerned largely with the subdivisions of the great Race, concerned with the presenta­tion I spoke of, of eternal truths in a new form fitted for the new sub-race which is gradually emerging out of its predecessors.

One thing comes out strongly and clearly as we try to take a large and rational view of  human history: that there is a Plan that under­lies it, a Plan according to which humanity is  builded, not suddenly, not by leaps and bounds, but in a definite order. Just as the architect plans a building, and then it rises, stage by stage according to the plan, so do we find in that great building of humanity stage after stage arising, quality after quality super-added, a definite building, not a sudden creation, and the plan of the building - Evolution. Here again I can only point you to a few proofs of that; you can multiply them almost endlessly [9] for yourselves. Take what has gone on within what you acknowledge as history, the gradual  peopling of Europe; take the coming into Europe of that great race the descendants of which are called the Latin peoples today - we call them the fourth sub-race, or the Keltic,­ - entering into Greece, spreading over the whole of the south of Europe, travelling northwards then for a while into Scandinavia and across from Scandinavia by Scotland - by Britain, in fact - into Ireland, peopling every land, just as a wave sweeps over a beach, peopling the great continent of Europe with a race in which emotion predominated over intellect, and beauty was the expression that was sought, and art the heritage of the sub-race. Think of ancient Greece and ancient Rome, with their splendid architecture and their magnificent sculpture; think of their successors in Italy, of the great schools of Italian painters, remembering that Art includes forms of every kind, not only in the outer shaping of wood or stone or brick, but in that subtler shaping of form to thought which we call art in literary expression, in poetry, in prose, in all the perfection of the literary excellence which is even today the pride of the Latin races. Think of the French­men, how the French thinker expresses himself, and how the French nation judges the thinker. You will never find a thought accepted by the mass of the French people, nor by its judges and critics, unless the form is as perfect [10] as the thought is good; failure in thought is almost more pardonable than failure in form - for where thought always seeks to express itself in beauty, literary perfection is a necessary condition of the success of the thought ex­pressed. Compare that with the Teutonic, the sub-race that followed on the Keltic, where Science represents to that race what Art was to its forerunner. Realise that in the Teuton it is the mind that is seeking for full expression by knowledge rather than by form; contrast the expression of the German and the English with the French expression in science, and you will find that both in Germany and in England the thought, however strong, is often  clumsy in expression, obscure in presentation; but the peoples of both countries look rather  to the strength and the virility of the thought than to the perfection of its artistic expression in the form.

And just as you see there a fourth sub-race and a fifth sub-race, so a sixth sub-race is issuing, as I pointed out to you at length some years ago. There the quality to be developed, built on to the emotions, built on to the mind, is that higher quality, intuition, that is beginning to assert itself even in the philosophy of our time - that intuition which sees rather than reasons, which knows by direct vision rather than by following a chain of logical argument, that which is the power of the Spirit rather than the power of the mind or of the emotions. [11] That is the next quality to be builded, to be the characteristic quality of the sixth sub-race of humanity.

And looking thus at it you find that religions follow a corresponding order; you find that each sub-race has its own religious note, which is as different as its note in emotional or mental expression. You see how in the first great sub-race that made India its habitation, the  idea of mutual Duty of every member of the social organism was the keynote of the religion  that was given by the great teachers to their people. You see the survival of that in forms too rigid, and, therefore, mischievous, in what is known as the caste system of India; but while you may see that now it is doing much of harm to the progress of the people, you are bound, if you are rational, also to see that that keynote of the social order will have to return in a higher form, in a higher civilisation, and that the sense of mutual duty and mutual obligation is the one binding force by which the nation and the community can live. And then, if you trace the second sub-race which lived on the borders of the Mediterranean, you see that to which in these modern days we give the name of Magic, the use of the human body to influence the subtler worlds by finding out the correspondences between man, who is only the microcosm, with the mighty macrocosm in which he lives, and of which he is the reflection in miniature. And [12] if you pass on from there to Persia, it is the note of Purity which rings out above all others. If from there you go to Greece, Beauty is the keynote, as in Rome Law is the highest note struck by the civilisation. And then you come on to the Christian faith with its cry of Self­-sacrifice, and the Mussulman repeating the note of the earlier teaching of the Hindu, of God, the One without a second, that the ancient Hindus proclaimed. And if you have eyes to see, you realise that all these are notes that make up the perfect chord of the One  Eternal Religion, which is the knowledge of God Himself, the realisation of God in the  human Spirit, the knowledge of God because man is himself divine. And because the Theosophists, and above all the Occultists, see in all human religions but partial expres­sions of one great series of spiritual truths, therefore to every people they speak through their own religion, and not through a religion which is not theirs. The Theosophist would  no more think of teaching the Hindu through Christian forms than he would dream of teach­ing the Christian through Hindu forms; any more than he would try to speak to a French audience in English, or to an English audi­ence in French. To every man according to his own tongue; to every man according to his own faith. There is but one religion with many facets; and the perfection of religion is to see the unity in diversity among them [13] all, and that comes from this great teaching of Brotherhood - always one Teacher for all the world’s faiths through thousands and thous­ands of years.

Now, the idea that such Superhuman Beings had much to do with the affairs of men is no new idea, no mere Theosophical fad. In Christian antiquity you find the thought put forward that over every nation there presided a great Angel. Read the way in which Origen speaks of the Angel Guardians of nations and of the world. The idea in the East was a little more complicated. So far as I know - but there I may be wrong - I do not think that in  Christian antiquity you can find the idea that Saints as well as Angels shared in the guidance  of our mortal world; but in the East, whilst they recognised what here would be called “the ministry of Angels”, speaking of them as the Shining Ones - so often mistranslated ‘God’ -whilst they recognised their work in many grades as the older Christians recognised the ministry of the nine great Orders in the angelic host, they joined side by side with them the men who had attained perfection, those who had passed that great fifth Initiation of which I was speaking to you with the others last year, men who have finished the ordinary human life, who have passed beyond the cycle of births and deaths known as reincarnation, who have reached that point of overcoming of which the Apocalypse speaks when it declares [14] of him that overcometh he “shall be a pillar in the temple of my God and go forth no more”.  Those who have overcome, not for Their own gain but for the helping of humanity, Those who are liberated Spirits, who have bound Themselves in the bonds of the flesh by love and not by compulsion, Those who are divine men, who have perfected the human cycle of evolution, it is They who share with the angelic host the guidance of evolution in the world in which we are. For this world is not lonely as it rolls through space, nor confined only to the men bound still to the wheel of births and deaths. The spiritual world interpenetrates the physical, as every religion has declared; Superhuman Beings move amongst us and take their part in the affairs of men.

If you care to read a record in written books, take some of the old Hindu books, and read how these perfected men visited the courts of kings in order to see that kingdoms were well governed and royal duties were honourably performed. You may read how such a mighty Sage and Saint, known as superhuman by the powers that He possessed, would visit the court of the King, question the King as to the condition of the people, ask him whether he is seeing that every grade of the people is supplied with all that it needs: whether the craftsman has materials ready to his hand; whether the agriculturist is well supplied with seed for the future harvest; whether the widows of his [15] soldiers who have died in battle and the  orphans left behind are carefully guarded by him; whether he is seeing to the education of his people, and taking care that all the grades of the nation are performing their appointed duties. You may read this in page after page, in story after story. And, although no longer visible, They walk among men still; the work They are striving to do is more difficult to­day, for it is against the battling wills of men and the resistance of the developing mind. In those days, readily was Their guidance accepted, and, therefore, They walked openly among the people; but it was necessary for human evolu­tion that the mind should develop with all its power of challenge, with all its demand for proof, with its resistance to authority, with its refusal to obey where it did not understand. Do not be mistaken and think that this is evil; there is nothing evil which helps forward the evolution of man. The time came when the child-state had to end for a while, and the developing youth of the mind must have its way. So the Guardians drew back from sight but never from labour, and worked unseen and unhampered by the growing conditions of humanity, but with the same heart of love, the same brain of wisdom as in the elder days. It is They who pull down Empires and build them up, who bring about equilibrium between nations and do not allow a single set of national ideals so to triumph over the world [16] that all others shall give way before them. It is They who gradually build up a great Empire and give to some sub-race the ruling of the world; it is They who are giving to England today the possibility of the mighty part that she may play in the advancing humanity of the time, of World-Empire mightier than any Empire of the past, to be based not on the submission of conquered peoples, but on the free-will allegiance of self-governing but united communities. That is done today, not by direct order from the mouth of the recognised Superior, but by the subtler working on the ambitions and the passions and the thoughts of men. The opportunity is given, and if rejected passes away to someone else who is able to grasp, is able to utilise it. And it is because of that that many of us feel today that the fate of the future lies in the balance, whether this fifth sub-race of ours will rise to the sense of its responsibility, will know that power means duty and not oppression, and so will make a mightier rule than has ever been known in the stories of the past. But it is these greater Ones behind who really pull the strings to which our statesmen and our rulers dance obediently, and, in the pulling, educate the people, and so help forward the general evolu­tion of the race.

Now suppose for a moment that that Theo­sophical idea commended itself to you as throw­ing light on history - which on many points of [17] the rising and falling of Empires is obscure and unintelligible; if you can take that thought that behind all the powers that rule there is a mighty divine Will working through human imperfection with the help of Superhuman Agents, then you can look on all the troubles of the time as evidently working out to a fore­seen end; you can see in the unrest and the distress not the breaking up of a civilisation, but the instability that belongs to growth and that is to be guided to progress; and you will begin to realise that if some outer forms decay, it is because the living Spirit within them is growing too large for the garments that clothed it in the past, and that we may feel secure that, as a nation does its duty, new forms will evolve fitted for its greater manifestation, and so the building up of the human race will continue as it has continued through so many changes in the past.

Let us ask now what are the special methods of the manifestation of Superhuman Men. That you may clearly follow this, I must trouble you for a moment with one or two details as to the constitution of man. You must realise that every one of you is a living and spiritual In­telligence, that you show out the Spirit in three chief ways, the aspects of the Spirit - by Will or Power, Wisdom, and the creative activity of Intellect. Those are yourself, your innermost nature. But then you clothe yourself in matter, in order that these may develop in this lower [18] world. The aspect of the Intellect embodies itself as mind; the aspect of Wisdom embodies itself as emotion; the aspect of Will embodies itself as self-determination in our lower world, the precedent of action. All kinds of matter are utilised by these spiritual forces in order that they may express themselves in the various worlds in which we live; but those material garments are not you; they are but the clothes you wear; and you may learn, if you will, and care to take the trouble, to separate one garment from another and to utilise them freely, as you utilise that fleshly garment which, for some of you, is the only body that you know.

For the moment, take that as hypothesis, study it at your leisure; but without understanding that it is a spiritual Intelligence working in various kinds of matter, as we know matter here, which is meant, you will not be able to understand those methods of manifes­tation which I have called Inspiration, Over­shadowing, and Incarnation. Think, then, of the matter that you use, as a garment that can be put off and on; think of yourself as the living spiritual Intelligence with the three aspects I have mentioned; and realise that, with every change of consciousness, every mood of mind, there is a vibration in the matter in which the consciousness is clothed, which answers to the change in consciousness, changelessly as to method, each mood having its own expression in the vibrations by which matter responds. [19]

 

 

I. - INSPIRATION

 

Now, there is nothing save in degree different in these forms of manifestation of Superhuman Beings from the ways in which you influence each other. There is an enormous difference in degree, there is no difference of kind; every one of us, all the time, is influencing all with whom we come into contact, some more than others according to the force of consciousness which is able to have stronger vibrations of matter correlated with itself, but the way in which one consciousness influences another in the physical is by means of these vibrations of matter, which cause similar vibrations in other bodies with which they come into con­tact. That is the special point that I want you theoretically for the moment to accept. Have you sometimes found in studying science that you understand a thing better when a brilliant teacher explains it, than when you read it in a book? What is the difference?  It is not in the thought; the thought may be the same on the printed page and in the spoken words; but it is that the matter correlated to the changing thought of the teacher, vibrating under his greater knowledge and more highly developed powers of mind, sets vibrating the mental matter in your own body, and so enables your consciousness to answer as the vibrations again are responded to by the changing mood of thought. He transmits his thought to you [20] through the matter that clothes you, and he raises you to a higher point of comprehension than you could win by your own unaided power. That is a constant experience; you find it with the orator as well as with the scientific teacher. A thing which is plain to you while the orator is speaking, which you grasp, which you realise, which you are sure you know, is half lost on  the following day, and you find you cannot repeat it perfectly left to your unaided powers.

What, then, has the speaker done? What effect has the teacher wrought on you? He has made you answer to himself; lie has in­spired you by means of the contact which you have experienced from his word and from his thought. Now carry that on further, and you will find what Inspiration means. Where a higher being is inspiring an ordinary man or  woman, the effect of that Inspiration is a stimulation of the faculties that the man or woman already possesses, because the matter in which he is clothed is compelled to vibrate in unison at a higher rate of vibration than he is able to initiate for himself. That is what Inspiration means. It functions or flowers, as it were, on our material garments - the vibra­tions of one whose body works at a higher vibration than does ours, and so the inner God is able to shine out more completely, the  faculties that exist in us are stimulated under the abnormal action, and what we call Inspira­tion is nothing more than stimulation from a [21] higher to a lower, imposing on the lower for the time that higher vibration, and so enabling  the faculties the man already possesses to open out into flower where they only existed as bud. You may have Inspiration in art, in poetry, in literature, but its nature is ever the same, the stimulation of faculties you possess, the opening out of the hidden God through the higher vibrations imposed upon you from without.

So at once you realise there are many degrees of Inspiration, according to the power of response of the one on whom this force is exercised, his power to reproduce that which the Superhuman Being is striving to use for his stimulation, for lifting him to a higher plane of thought. And so you begin to realise that if you yourself would be inspired by higher and Superhuman Beings you must purify your vehicles in order that the finer matter in them may be able freely to respond. You must purify your physical body and brain by abstain­ing from all unclean and gross forms of food; you must purify your emotional nature by cast­ing aside the animal and rising into the human emotions; you must purify your mental nature by thinking nobly, purely, grandly, by casting out of the mind, the moment it enters, any thought that is low or base or foul. For Inspira­tion can only work where the vehicles are made pure, and the limit of our Inspiration is the limit of receptivity which we have made by the train­ing of the lower nature. But it is open to all [22] of you to have that Inspiration more or less perfectly according as you become pure and noble and selfless, to each according to his measure. The thimble or the vast tank can be filled alike from an ever-flowing stream; but the size of the receptacle determines the amount of water which can flow into it, and it is ours to make the receptacle in order that the Inspira­tion may lead us to greater usefulness to men.

 

 

II. – OVERSHADOWING

 

What, then, is Overshadowing? As Inspira­tion is stimulation by higher vibrations, Over­shadowing is the dominating of consciousness for a time by the Superhuman Helper. The consciousness of the man is dominated, not stimulated. The idea dominates his thought, and becomes to him apparently his own. Many a one is overshadowed by a Higher Being who is not conscious of the source of the thoughts that come into his mind; thoughts of desire for service, thoughts of aspirations for the helping of men, these are breathed out from a higher consciousness to a lower, and they dominate the lower and become its ideal. Ideals, those fixed ideas that guide and control conduct, constantly come from the overshadow­ing power of a higher than ourselves, lifting up a picture so beautiful that we needs must love it, and, in loving it, try to reproduce its beauty in ourselves. And this, again, may be in [23] different stages. The Overshadowing may be of the brain, so that some great thought dominates the brain; it may be of the subtle mind, so that from that flow downwards to the brain these thoughts that uplift and help. Or it may be from the very Spirit itself in its subtlest garments of finer matter, so that the material, dominated for the time by the more highly opened Spirit, receives from it these great ideals which then come down to be slowly translated into life. And here again, if you would ever have that grace of Over­shadowing from a higher, you must try to keep your consciousness under the control of the higher, and not of the lower. The lower is good as a servant, it is fatal as a master; the lower is useful as an instrument, it is harmful when it strives to direct. The man who would receive the Overshadowing of the higher must have the consciousness ready to respond to all that comes from above, to nothing that comes from below. For the life of a man must flow either upwards or downwards, either outwards or inwards; and those only can be over­shadowed who are trying to turn to the Gods  within them, and not surrendering themselves to the bodies without them, those who are  trying to make love and wisdom the character­istic and natural expression of their consciousness. On them may come down that power of the higher which for the time shall dominate them and make them more than men. [24]

 

 

III. – INCARNATION

 

But when you come to the last of the three words I took, Incarnation, you are coming to a different method; no longer stimulation, as in Inspiration; no longer domination, as in Over­shadowing; but substitution; a Higher Being who, desiring to work through some physical instrument for some great purpose, chooses a physical instrument which he can use for the purpose on which his mind and heart are set. We find such cases in the history of the past, most especially in the case of the Founders of great religions. One thing characterises most of these; it is that distinction familiar in the ancient Christian Church, held by those who were called the Gnostics or Knowers. You may remember how in the early Church there was much controversy as to the nature of Jesus Christ; how some regarded Him as God Himself, others considered that the human body was the body of a chosen disciple trained and prepared through many years of pure and noble living and devoted aspiration, in order that when you come to the time marked in the Gospel as the baptism, the Spirit of God, the Christ Himself, might descend and abide upon him. And so those early Christian Knowers declared that the disciple Jesus and the Christ were two distinct individuals, never to be con­fused, and that all the disciple gave to the Christ was the outer physical body that He [25] wore; that the inner subtler bodies were those of the Christ Himself, far higher - nay, no comparison is possible between those spiritual bodies of the Christ and anything that can be worn by mortal man on earth, - and that when He, the great Teacher, deigned to come, He took but the outer shell of His devoted disciple, and that shell, surrendered to the greater One, left the disciple himself clothed in his subtle bodies of lower evolution, while through the body of flesh the divine man was manifest; and so men saw in the face of the Christ the very vision of Divinity Himself.

That was the older, wiser teaching of the Christian Church, cast out later as knowledge grew less and confusion took the place of vision. And so in every great divine Incarnation of earlier days, the same method appears to have been followed, of a body specially prepared and trained for many years and then surrendered in loving sacrifice, in order that it might be the vehicle of a mightier Being to work out for man what none but He might do. That is called Incarnation, where the body of flesh is taken but where the Being is the supreme Teacher of the world.

And even that, if you think, is nothing so ab­normal, nothing so strange; for what is each one of you but a divine Incarnation? Al­though the divinity in you is not unfolded as it  was in Him to whom the West has given the name of the Christ, all of you are truly divine [26] Incarnations; but the Divinity in you is but as a germ and seed, not yet unfolded into leaf and  flower. But one reason why the passionate love of man has gone out to these supreme  Teachers more than to any other Child of Man is not only that the beauty of Divinity is  revealed in man, so that man becomes what he essentially is - divine, but because every such  Teacher is the promise of the future; because you and I in aeons, in ages to come, shall also  unfold the Divinity which in Him was made manifest, because, as your own Testament tells  you, Christ is but the first-born among many brethren, and in every one of His brethren the  beauty of the Godhead is ultimately to be un­veiled, to be manifested. And so the heart of humanity goes out to Them as to the promise of the future, as well as the splendour of the past, not only the manifestation of God trium­phant in one human form, but the promise of God manifest in every human form. That every Child of Man shall be a manifested Child of God - that is the glory of Their attraction.

And never forget, you who belong to the Christian faith, that the great teacher S. Paul  was not satisfied with the mere acceptance of Christian doctrines, that he was not satisfied  with Baptism and Communion, the two univers­ally recognised Sacraments of the Christian  Church; he declared that they were but little children who knew but those outer elements,  and that he travailed for his converts, until, as [27] he said, “Christ be born in you”; for of what  avail is Christ to you as an outer ideal unless He is born within you to reproduce the life  which is His? Every great religion has its ideal, its divine mission under different names; but names are nothing where the life is one. The Buddhist thinks of the Lord Buddha, and, looking inward, he declares: “Thou art Buddha”. The Hindu thinks of the divine manifestations spoken of in his own faith, and declares himself to be one with the manifestations in whom he believes. And if you give the name of Christ to that supreme Teacher who, some two thousand years ago, came to give to the West its own religion, remember that His value to you is not only that of a mighty example - though great indeed is the value of that example of perfection shown to men, - but far more that you should reproduce Him in yourself, far more that the infant Christ should be born in the cave of your heart; that in you He should develop to boyhood, to youth, to manhood, until you have grown “to the measure of the stature of the fulness of Christ”. It is not a Christ outside you who saves; it is not a Christ outside you who redeems; it is the Christ within, who transforms the man into His own image, and makes him realise that as the Father in Heaven is perfect, so is perfection the inevitable goal of man. [28]

 

II

 

SAVIOURS OF THE WORLD,

OR WORLD-TEACHERS

 

STOCKHOLM, 15th June 1913

 

 

FRIENDS:

We are to deal here with the special mani­festations of two Superhuman Men in History and Religion, with the life, the power, of two Supreme Teachers of the world. Tonight the general theory is to be the subject of discourse; we are to trace through age after age the re­appearance of this World-Teacher for the help­ing of man, for the founding of great religions. Then, in another discourse, we are to study the subject from its more mystical side, to consider the relation of the human Spirit to the divine, and to try to see the conditions of the unfolding of the Christ in man. Those of you who are familiar with Christian teaching will remember how the great Initiate, S. Paul, pointed out that it was the intention of the Christian religion to bring about the birth of the Christ within the individual believer, and that the Christ-Child, thus born in the human Spirit, was to grow [29] and to develop until the full stature of the Christ was reached in man. Until that becomes objectively true, as it is ever true implicitly, in the human being, Christ cannot become the first-born among many brethren, surrounded by, those who have reproduced in themselves His own likeness, so that the great family of the Sons of God shall be realised as the rationale of the evolution of the Sons of Man.

It will be reasonable at the outset of our thinking to trace, however briefly, however imperfectly, that great human evolution which changes the imperfect into the perfect, the weak into the strong, the Son of Man into the Son of God. For it has been recognised in the great faiths of the world that there is a path which human feet may tread; and long before the Christian faith came to the helping of the world, that path was described as a narrow path, a razor path, a path difficult to tread, and the name by which it was and is known in ancient occult teaching is the same name by which Christian Mystics have called it in modern days - it has ever been named the “Way of the Cross”. For the idea of the Cross as known in the ancient world was that the life of God came down in order that the world might be lifted up through that life; and in the ancient symbolism it was said that the Spirit was crucified in matter, that Spirit de­scended into matter in order that matter might be uplifted into Spirit; and you may remember [30] how Plato wrote, speaking of the second mani­festation of divine life, that which in our own phraseology we call the Second LOGOS; how it was said that the LOGOS, the Wisdom, was shown in the form of a cross in the uni­verse, decussated as a cross. That ancient idea is profoundly true, and manifests one of the great occult truths of evolution, and that is the idea that underlies the Cross in all the ancient pre-Christian faiths.

You find it ever as the sign of Spirit descend­ing into matter, and then as the sign of Spirit triumphant over matter; so that everywhere it stands as the sign of life emerging from the grave, the grave being the matter and the Spirit the Life triumphant. It is found on ancient pottery, it is found painted in ancient frescoes, it is found carved in ancient stone and decorating the sides of the walls of temples which were ruined before the modern faith of Christianity was born. And this is natural, inasmuch as all faiths contain the same essential truths, use the same significant symbols, and those symbols ever indicate the same spiritual verities. As this truth dawns upon us not only from the statements of ancient faiths, not only from the researches of occult investigators, but from the testimony of antiquarians and  archaeologists who have searched into the ruins and the fragments left behind by ancient civilisa­tion, as we see this truth emerging from the fundamental identity of the great faiths of the [31] world, we feel a strong power, a certainty of conviction of the essential truths of religion,  which could never be ours so long as our faith depended on a single book, so long as we saw  only a single revelation, instead of the constant manifestations of God in man.

And so we find in our study of religious truths that there has ever been the idea that  gradually man might quicken his evolution  and tread onward, step by step, along the narrow path which should lead him to the life that knows no ending, when for him the cycle of births and of deaths would be over, and the one who had overcome, who had conquered all the difficulties of life, should become a pillar in the temple of his God, to go forth no more, but to support the temple for the reception  of men.

In modern days, by those same antiquarian researches that I have spoken of, the history of our globe has been rolled far back into the centuries. Tens and hundreds of thousands of years have gradually been seen to be all too short for the story of the evolution of man. When some of us were children in the Western world, we were taught that the history of our globe was comprised within a brief six thousand years, and when, shortly before the French Revolution, that most remarkable Mayor of Paris, M. Bailly, published in Europe the  chronology brought from India - the chrono­logy brought from the Brahmanas of India, [32] and it was seen that they reckoned the age of the world not by tens of thousands but by hundreds of thousands of years, that each age in the world which made only part of its story was to be measured by many hundreds of thousands of years - when that first came across from the East to the West, it was laughed at as Oriental exaggeration. But modern Western research has proved its ac­curacy, and those long ages of Brahmanic chronology are accepted by modern science, and seen to be necessary for the tremendous evolution that lies behind. So gradually, bit by bit, more and more light has been thrown upon the path, and it has come to be realised  by very many - I do not for a moment pretend that in Europe it is as yet by the majority, but  by many of the deeper thinkers, by those who try to solve some of the problems of the human  race - it is seen by them that the only explana­tion of this long evolution of consciousness,  which goes side by side with the long evolution of forms, must lie in a continuing consciousness which unfolds itself in body after body, in age after age, until it develops from the ignorance of the savage up to the heights of genius, up to heights of wisdom and of holiness.

And so it will come with no surprise to the student, when the idea is presented to him, that Those who are seen in the world’s history towering high above Their fellow-men, Those who bear the sacred names in the great [33] religions of the world, that Those also were once men as we are men, and have climbed upwards to Their divine perfection through the difficulties and struggles that now encompass us, Their younger brethren. When we recall the words spoken by the Christ when He was last on earth, “Be ye therefore perfect, even as your Father which is in Heaven is perfect”, we realise that to reach such divine perfection demands not one brief span of human life, but many and many a life during which that perfec­tion is attained, and we begin to understand that when we see the Saint on earth, he is but marking one stage of the progress along the road which each one of us shall tread; and that beyond that Saint, exquisite as his life may be, there stretch great reaches of super­human perfection; and at the very summit of those, on the high mountain-peaks, covered as it were with the dazzling whiteness of divine perfection, there stands the flower of our race, the man who has become divine, and who is therefore able to help His younger brethren still struggling up the mountain side; that even the world’s Saviours were once men like ourselves who have evolved the God within Them, the God hidden in us, made manifest in Them.

And these great Founders of religion show marks of strange similarity. It is not only that in the story of Their lives a similar history is seen to be outlived age after age; but it [34] is also seen that Their teachings are funda­mentally identical; that over and over and over again the same moral teaching comes forth from those divine lips, the same great precepts which are to lead us to perfection are spoken in the ears of different nations, are given out in different tongues, the meaning ever the same. We notice the earliest World­-Teacher who came to the instructing of the childhood of our Aryan race - in that great cradle of the Race which will once again be acknowledged in time to come as it was in the past, found in Central Asia - known under the name of Vyasa, the Teacher who gave in that far-off time the Sanatana Dharma, the Eternal Religion, the Wisdom Religion, which since has spread its branches under different names over all the children of the Aryan race; we find Him teaching: “To do good to another is right; to do evil to another is wrong”. We find Him declaring that that which you would not have another do to you, you should not do to another, but that which you would wish done to yourself, that you should do to your fellow-men. That teaching, familiar to you as the teaching of “the Golden Rule”, is a rule that has ever been given by great World-Teachers in the past; and as we see the similarity of teaching underlying differences of presentment, as in a moment I will show you, we see that these resemblances are so striking that they must needs come from a [35] single spirit; we are not surprised to hear that the World-Teacher remains one and the same through many and many an age of human history, through many and many a stage of human civilisation; that it is the same mighty Teacher who comes back again and again into the world He loves, who is known under different names, it is true, but the names veil the same mighty Individual, the same World­-Teacher, the same Prophet of the different faiths, bringing the same message, teaching the same truths, breathing the same compassionate love; He is the same age after age, appearing in His world for its helping, and thus lifting humanity age after age another step up to the golden ladder which ends at the feet of God.

And seeing this gradually come out from the story of the past, we begin to see in human evolution two lines of mighty helping, used for the evolution and the gradual uplifting of men; two lines of saving and of guiding, the one the  line of the Ruler, the other of the Teacher ; the  one the line of the Protector who guides the fate of nations; who builds the earth age after age into different distributions of continents and of oceans; who has in hand the evolving of the different Races of mankind - each Race bringing out its characteristic qualities, and so gradually contributing its share to the final perfection of humanity. And side by side with the line of the Ruler, the Protector, the King, we see the line of the Teacher, of the Founder of the [36] faiths of the word, of the Guide of spiritual evolution, who gives to one faith after another its own characteristic note, its own dominant teaching; so that, as all the great truths are to be found in each faith, there is also one in each faith which dominates the rest, giving to it its own peculiar colour, evolving in it its own peculiar characteristics; just as the Races are builded into the final perfection of humanity, so the religions also are builded to bring out one by one the great qualities which are needed in spiritual evolution, until both outer and inner perfection shall crown the working out of the mighty Plan, made by the Divine Architect before our humanity was born, to reach its consummation when our world had touched its ending, and its fruitage is the perfection of  humanity.

Looking at it, then, in that wide way, we see the Ruler and the Teacher coming down  the stream of history side by side, each with his own work, and as the life in the East, so far  as our Aryan race is concerned, is older than the life in the West, we find an eastern name  given to the World-Teacher in those eastern lands - a name which means the Essence of  Wisdom; sometimes in Theosophical books you come across the name Bodhisattva, and that translated is simply Wisdom-Essence, the Essence of Wisdom, and wisdom is knowledge  penetrated by love. And so the World-Teacher in those older days is known by this eastern [37] name, just as in later days in the West the World-Teacher took the Greek name for the nations of Christendom, that name of the Anointed, the Christos, by which He is known among us.

But the difference of names must not blind us to the identity of function, and of teacher-­ship. We must realise that names vary with languages, but Truth is eternal, and remains the same; and the World-Teacher brings it out from time to time in order that man may learn gradually what he could not learn at once, and realise that great Knowledge of God which is in very truth Eternal Life.

We see, then, down the ages certain great figures stand out, the Founders of religions, and I am limiting myself to the Aryan race, omitting Those that have gone before, not because that history is not also profoundly interesting, but because in a single lecture one must limit the area of discourse if the object is to be worked out of conveying such hints of knowledge as shall lead some of you to study for yourselves. For remember, that the only object of a lecture is to stimulate the hearers into study; not to give them a mere superficial idea, which is all that any lecture can do, but to be a sign-post pointing to the road along which every student must walk for himself; for only by individual study can knowledge worthy of the name be gained, and the duty of the lecturer is only to point out the way, every man having to study [38] for himself and to gain by his own efforts a grasp of Truth.

These great Teachers, then, that we see shin­ing out from time to time in the history of mankind, in the history of our own Race, when They appeared in our world, founded certain religions. Of those great religions the oldest in the Aryan race is that which you know in its modern form as Hinduism. That is followed by the religion that grew up in later Egypt, that spread along the borders of the Mediter­ranean, that shaped not the modern but the very ancient Greeks who preceded the modern, and left its traces on some of the Mediterranean Islands, the whole basin of the Mediterranean being the receptacle of the teaching.

And then the third great faith, that which came from Persia, the very ancient Persia beyond the Persia of our books of history. Then the great stream of teaching that settled itself in Greece, among those who, in com­parison with the very ancient, make up the modern Greeks, the teaching that in a moment, with the others, I will describe. Then the fifth of these streams, that expresses itself under the name of Christendom, and became the faith of the western world. Five in number you will notice, each the religion of one sub­division of the great Aryan race. For these large sub-divisions into which a Root Race, as we call it, divides itself, these great streams of emigration from a central point that spread [39] over the world in all directions and add a new perfection to humanity, each has its own funda­mental proclamation of Truth, varied as the sub-race divides again into nations, into families, but always the same root from which the trunk and branches spread; and you can see what we may call a family likeness in all the smaller branches that spring from the branch which  runs back to the parent trunk. Five, then, are these sub-divisions, and five the great religions belonging each to each.

The first of these is that in which Hinduism originated - a religion which had as its special mark the sense of Duty between the members of the community, which struck the keynote of the Duty of man to man, and founded that Duty in the recognition of the One Divine Life in which every human being inheres, from which he draws his own individual life. I mentioned the name given to the World­-Teacher when He came forth to found that ancient faith, the name of Vyasa, and He took as the symbol of His teaching that body, that divine body, that we call the Sun of our system. If you look at the symbol under which God is  expressed in that ancient faith, you will find that it ever goes back to the Sun, from which the life of the system pours forth; for as all life in our solar system comes forth from the Sun,  and every planet takes from the Sun its light and life, so in Hinduism was the Sun regarded  as the outer manifestation of God Himself, the [40] one Life of the world and of all that lived  therein; and we find its central prayer - the prayer that is ever repeated by every Hindu as he turns eastwards as the Sun rises, and bows before the Sun as its light dawns in the eastern sky - you find that ancient prayer still  ringing from modern lips: “That Sun we worship; may the divine radiance make wise, may it brighten our thought”. To that divine Life and Light, recognised as divine in the outer world and as the source of all physical as well as all emotional and mental and spiritual life, the cry goes up from that ancient faith day by day, that that light which we worship may shine in us and irradiate us. As the heat and the warmth and the light of the Sun were the symbols by which the World-Teacher gave knowledge and wisdom to the first religion of our Aryan race, so we find that after a while He retired and left in the field His pupils to carry on the knowledge and to spread the truths He taught.

It was not until another great emigration went forth, that which went forth to Arabia, to Egypt, along the basin of the Mediterranean, the second of which I spoke, that He again came forth from His home in Central Asia, and, taking the body of a disciple in Egypt, began to teach the same ancient truth of the One Life in every man, in the outer world as well as in his inner heart. But in Egypt He spoke a language a little different, and instead of taking [41] the Sun itself as the symbol of divinity, He took the Light which came forth from it and which dwelt also in the hearts of men; it is from ancient Egypt that those words were drawn, so familiar to every one of you in the Fourth Gospel of the Christian Church, of the “Light which lighteth every man that cometh into the world”. Those were the words He spoke in the name that is known in the West as Hermes, or as Thoth in the ancient Egyptian faith; He, the Messenger of the Supreme, declared that the Light which exists in the world around us lives also in our own hearts, and He taught that man should look within for the divine Light and find it burning within his own heart. He taught that when once you see the Light burning within yourself, then, and then only, shall you be able to recognise the Light as it burns in the heaven above us, as it shines in the world around us; for only as we know God in ourselves, do we learn to see God in all who are around us. Nay, to us He is not only in the man, but in the animal, the vegetable, the mineral kingdoms, for there is nothing which exists, moving or unmoving, that could for one moment be bereft of Him, in a world where all is God; there is not the lowest grain of dust that is not penetrated with the one divine Light even as it shines out in the highest Archangel; for the Light is one, and that Light is the Light of the world.

And so He taught through Light the ancient [42] hidden side of the old Egyptian lore. Many a sentence is to be found of the Light. The King of Egypt, the Ruler, is told that his one great duty is to “Look for the Light”, for only as the King sees the divine Light in the people that he rules can he be truly King by the grace of God, recognising divinity in his subjects as he feels it within himself. And  the priests were taught to “Follow the Light”, and the people were told to “Seek for the  Light”; and so everywhere in ancient Egypt the Light was the symbol of the Godhead, and only as it irradiated the heart of man could man hope to realise the splendour of the divine Life. Egypt, because its central teaching was of Light, had as the keynote of its faith, Knowledge. Knowledge and science are as much characteristic of the ancient faith of Egypt as Duty founded on the recognition of the One Life was the dominant note of ancient India. The ‘Wisdom of Egypt’ has come down through the ages, and, as you know, even one of our sciences, chemistry, takes its name from the ancient land of Khem, the old name of Egypt. For Law is the symbol of Knowledge, as Duty is the flower of Truth.

And then another emigration was to come forth, that which was to people ancient Persia. To Persia the same great World-Teacher came forth, there to give the religion that you know under the name of Zarathustra, the Teacher of Purity; and he took Fire as the symbol [43] of God, because fire is the great purifier. When you cast gold into the fire, the dross is burnt up and only the pure metal remains. As you cast the human being into the fire of struggle and of difficulty, the dross of weakness is burnt away, and the pure gold of the strength of the Spirit remains. And when He went to Persia and took His human form, the form of a well-beloved disciple, He preached the doctrine of the Fire to the Persian people; He bade them think of God as Fire, and bade them bear reverence to the earth as the shadow of God; to keep purity in their lives, their persons, their houses, their lands - Purity being as much the dominant note of the Zoroastrian faith, as Knowledge was the dominant note of the old faith of Egypt, and Duty that of India. And thus, teaching them this Purity symbolised by Fire, He built up that mighty civilisation of which the remnant still exists after some thirty thousand years.

Again the time came when another emigra­tion was to go forth, the fourth of these emigrating hosts, called by us the Keltic, although that name in Europe generally is restricted to some of the families that came forth from it, rather than to the root-trunk to which we give it. They, coming from their intermediate home, the Caucasus, passed from the Caucasus into Greece, and made the mighty nation of the Greeks as you know them, from ten thousand years before Christ [44] onwards. To them the great Teacher also came, but came in other guise, though teaching the same great truths; for He came to Greece as bringing the Beautiful, and he took as symbols of the Beautiful, music which is har­mony, where every power is made accordant with every other, and the perfect life is a life that breathes out music and therefore breathes out beauty. It was He who, as Orpheus, founded the great Orphic Mysteries, from which all the later Mysteries of Greece pro­ceeded. It was He who, playing on His lyre, attracted not only human beings but also the very animals from the fields and woods; for so compelling was that marvellous melody that it won the heart of every living creature that heard it, and the very trees, it is said, bowed down in homage as the notes flowed through them and gave a fresh beauty to every form, a fresh radiance to every colour. And be­ginning with those Orphic Mysteries and the teaching of the Orphic Prophets of the Beauti­ful, Beauty became the dominant note of Greece; so that whether it embodied itself in exquisite  architecture, whether it showed itself in wondrous sculpture, whether on the canvas the brush  brought out the glories of colour, or whether the thinker and the poet shaped the wondrous  Greek literature, you find that perfection of form which is characteristic not only of the  Greeks, the forefathers, but of all the Latin races of our modern Europe - you see in them [45] everywhere the one note of Beauty added to the ever-growing chord of human life.

And when that work was done, then the great World-Teacher who had been the same Individual appearing in the different forms, came for the last time back to India, and there He took on His last body, that you have heard of as Gautama, the Lord Buddha; for His work in this world was over, and wider fields called for His service, utter perfection having been reached by Him and His labour on earth fulfilled. You remember how here He reached what is called the perfect Illumina­tion, the perfect Enlightenment, and then, after teaching for some five-and-forty years of life, how He passed away from earth. But still they tell us in those eastern lands that from time to time His shadow shines forth upon the world in blessing; for He was the first of our humanity who touched that height of stainless perfection, He who, having been World-Teacher through these long ages of the past, handed on to His mighty Successor the function of teaching the Race through the further stages of its evolution - to Him who in the East is still called the Bodhisattva, who in the West appeared as the Christ.

For now another Individual, though of the same mighty Brotherhood of World-Teachers, comes forth on to the stage of the world in order to lift up our race to yet higher reaches of spirituality, to yet greater glory of perfection. [46] And we find Him first appearing in the eastern lands under a name that you will know very well - the name of Shri Krshna - that mar­vellous Child of eastern stories, who is an embodied Love, and who to two hundred and fifty millions of our Race today is the supreme Object of worship and of devotion. Very brief the life that there He led. As a youth He passed away, but so marvellous was His out-­welling love, so marvellous His compassionate tenderness, that even those few years of mortal life have changed, as it were, the aspect of Hinduism, and have made it a religion of Devotion where before it was rather a religion of Knowledge. Just so also among the Bud­dhists - the people who use the name of the Lord Buddha as that of their supreme Teacher - you find that they speak of Gautama, the Lord Buddha as the Buddha of Knowledge, but they speak of the One who is now the Supreme Teacher as the Buddha of Compassion. It was that brief life of love, which has made so wondrous a devotion in all our eastern brethren, that ‘Krshna-cult’, as it is called, which sud­denly springs up a few centuries before the Christian era, which is not traced to an definite beginning by the ordinary Orientalist in the West. They know not the true eastern story; therefore they cannot understand the religion of love, which suddenly sprang up in that eastern land. They cannot understand why, in many points, it is so like Christianity, [47]  why it has so much said in it of divine grace, of the helping of man by God, of the lifting up of the helpless and the sinner. They can­not understand how these strange likenesses to Christianity appear in a pre-Christian form of worship. They do not dream that the secret lies in the fact that it was the same World-Teacher who is the central Object of devotion in both, who is worshipped under the name of Krshna in India as He is wor­shipped under the name of Christ in Christ­endom. His great mission as the Christ was to the fifth sub-race of the Aryan people, those who spread over northern and western Europe, and these fourth and fifth sub-races intermingle one with the other, and you find the great faith of Christianity dominating them both.

If we saw that in the religions of the past there was a dominant virtue, its keynote, as it were, added to the great chord of perfection, if we saw that Duty and Knowledge and Purity and Beauty were the gifts of the World-Teacher of the past, who as the Lord Buddha gave the law to men, what do we find in the later religions, where the new World-Teacher has descended in order to lift humanity higher towards the perfection of divinity? We find in the cult of Shri Krshna, as I just said, an unbounded devotion, a perfect self-surrender of man to the object of his love; and if you ask me what is the note in Christianity which is the dominant note of that great faith, which [48] rang out as the keynote, which has largely changed the atmosphere of the world, you will find that that keynote is Self-Sacrifice – the development of the individual to know the value of himself, and then, the only use of that  value, to sacrifice himself for the good of his fellow-men. For just as the teaching of the Christ on earth laid so much stress on the value of the individual, as He reminded His hearers, “What shall it profit a man to gain the whole world and lose his own soul”; as He constantly pressed on His hearers the immense importance of the individual life; so you see Him teaching by His own perfect sacrifice even unto death that lesson of Self-Sacrifice which is the central truth of Christianity. For it is only when strength has been developed, it is only when greatness has been evolved, it is only as the strong man stands out conscious, knowing his strength, it is only then that you see the full beauty of the lesson: “Let him that is first among you be as your servant”; “He that is greatest is he that doth serve”. It is Christi­anity that teaches us the lesson that power is meant for service, and that strength is only noble when it is bowed to the uplifting of the weak. That is the keynote of the Christian faith, adding the value and the use of strength to all the lessons from the other great religions that have gone before it in the religious evolu­tion of man, and it is that lesson that Christen­dom is beginning to learn. [49]

Already that social conscience is awakened which begins to realise that knowledge and power and strength are only human, as they are vowed to the service of the race, and which accepts that great word of a Master of Wisdom and Compassion, caught up and proclaimed, strangely enough, by an English scientist, Huxley, that “the law of Self-Sacrifice is the law of evolution for the man”. That is the latest lesson that has come from the lips of the World-Teacher, in order that the human race may be able to step one rung further up the ladder of truth and of love.

You must remember that the teaching which is sent out in a great faith is not limited in its influence to the religion which sounds it forth. When a religion becomes a dominant expression in the world, as each great world’s faith does in time, then the keynote of the religion sounds out over the other religions and you find in them also an echo of the central teaching of the one which is leading the civilisation of the world. And so you find today in eastern faiths, that this note of Self-Sacrifice, struck so loudly by Christianity, is beginning to influence the lives of the nations and to be re-echoed by people after people. And while it is still true, as I have often said in addressing an eastern audience, that this ideal of altruism, of self­-sacrifice of the strong to the weak, showing itself as public spirit, showing itself forth as  the sense of public duty - while I have told [50] them that that is far more developed in the West than as yet it is in the East, still we can see in eastern nations the beginning of the answer to the keynote that in the West has been struck, and you find there also the dawn­ing of this public spirit in which strength is to be used for service, and knowledge for the helping of the ignorant. Every faith has had this idea, but it is the central idea in Christianity.

And looking back thus at the great World­-Teachers, at the two mighty Individuals, the  One succeeding the other in the mission of World-Teacher, you realise that at one time there is only a single World-Teacher for all the religions of the world. They all look up to the One, though under a different name.

Are you inclined at first to think that the Christ who is so precious to yourself should be your own personal possession, and should be­long only to the faith of Christianity? Is it not much more beautiful, is it not much more inspiring, does it not make you feel your Brotherhood more with the children of other religions and the followers of other faiths, if you realise that they worship your Christ under different names, and send up the homage of adoration to the same mighty Teacher, although the name by which they call Him is other than your Greek name of the West? It seems to me that to know that great truth, that there is  but the One, supreme over all faiths, that He [51] sends out His blessings to the faithful in all  religions, that the inspiration of love in them is His love that flows into them, that His love  protects them, that His wisdom guides them, that He is the purifier from all superstition, is a  more grandiose and inspiring view of the Christ, than if you thought of Him as belonging only to a single faith while the rest of the children of men are outside His love, His care, His  thought. Have you forgotten the words that you find in your Gospel: “Other sheep I have which are not of this fold “? Truly not of the Christian faith, but still belonging to the one World-Teacher, whom you here worship as the Christ. He knows His sheep and they are known of Him, although the Shepherd bears another title, and by some other name men love and adore the One.

Now has this great succession of the comings of the World-Teachers reached its ending? Has human evolution touched its goal? Are no more sub-divisions of the great Aryan race to be evolved? Is there no more progress stretching on our earth before the aspiring souls of men? Are we the highest evolution that humanity is to accomplish, the crown showing out the limit of the divine power on our earth? And yet how far are we from the perfection of the Father, which is the goal marked for humanity by the Christ Himself.

We cannot believe it; and as we do not believe that the outer evolution of man is over, [52] that there will be no more human Races bud­ding out from the stock of humanity, so neither can we believe that the spiritual evolution of man has touched its highest point, and that the World-Teacher is withdrawn from the earth, and shall not again tread in familiar human form the roads of the world He loves. And so to many of us, I do not say to all, the fact of the comings of the past is the prophecy of the comings of the future, and we believe that  whenever from the human branch a new branchlet is put forth, to that branchlet, as in the past, the great World-Teacher shall come with His message of wisdom and of love, with the wondrous inspiration of His presence, with the placing before the eye of the new human sub-race the example of a perfect life, which shall lift humanity a step nearer to the divine. Surely the long succession is not over; surely it cannot be that the life of the divine within us shall not expand to yet fairer forms, to yet more beauteous manifestations. And so there are many among us who look for His coming again, for that same great One who took human form in Palestine, and will, we believe, take it again for the helping and uplifting of our modern world. I ask you, has there been any time in the story of the world, in all those far ages of the past, in which the need of man was greater than his need today? in which he more required a help which can only come from above? in which he had more need of [53] a leader to guide him into the path of wisdom and of peace? Look abroad in every country at the hopeless poverty of the masses of the people; look at the ignorance, worse than the poverty - although they react upon each other, the poverty making worse the ignorance, and the ignorance breeding fresh poverty; look at the unrest in every nation; look at the discon­tent in those who yearn for a better social condition, for a nobler human life. See how in the young amongst you, the next generation, how the social conscience is awaking, how the more highly placed and the more wealthy are asking in every land: “What can we do for the redemption of our brethren, how can we help in the uplifting of our people?” See how on every side knowledge is growing and is beginning to grope after the inner things, the things that materialistic science will be unable to discover; and see the multiplying prayers arising from the heart of humanity, that He who once came as Teacher will come again as Teacher to the world that needs Him.

And as you think it over, pondering it in your own hearts, as you ask of the heavens above you and the world around you whether the need of man is not great enough to compel the Heart of Love again to reveal itself amongst us, then to you also shall the light of dawn become visible. Then for you too shall the Star in the East, the Morning Star, arise; and as that Morning Star presages the rising of [54] the Sun, and is lost in the beams of glory when he rises above the horizon and sheds his light upon our earth, so shall you see in the heavens the Sign of the Star, which the wise men of old saw and followed, seeking the infant King. You shall know that already the world is beginning to listen, to listen whether the sound of His footsteps may not be heard as they approach our earth. Will not you, many of you, join with us in the cry: “Come, O World­-Teacher, to enlighten the ignorance of the world; you, who saved it in years gone by, come as our Saviour once again”. [55]

 

III

 

“THE CHRIST IN MAN”

 

STOCKHOLM, 17th June 1913.

 

FRIENDS:

We have been listening to a song of triumph over death, and the ultimate triumph of the Spirit in man over the death of the body lies in the realisation of his own eternal life - a life which is his as a part of the life universal, his indefeasible birthright, that of which none may deprive him.[1] I think perhaps that something of scepticism may have arisen in our modern world because we have thought of man as the child of a day rather than as a native of im­mortality, coming down into a mortal world. For man immortality is inherent; it is the outward manifestation of that Eternity which is his as the offspring of the Eternal Himself.  But we have been inclined to identify man with his body, rather than with himself; to speak of him as though the Spirit were a possession instead of the body being but a garment. And so, looking at man in upside-down fashion, it [56] has been possible for us to ask whether he has a Spirit, whether he survives death, whereas really the question that we might very well ask is: “Why has this immortal Bird of Heaven plunged down into the ocean of matter, into mortal life?” Thus regarding man, we shall readily follow his long evolution and understand what is meant by the phrase “The Christ in man”; what is meant when the Apostle speaks of man growing to the “stature of the fulness of Christ”.

In order that we may understand definitely as well as aspire greatly, we have to understand the constitution, as it were, of this human Spirit, which is ourselves; and we think of it as coming forth from the Spirit Universal, as a seed might come from a tree. And just as surely as the seed can only reproduce the likeness of its parent, so can the human Spirit only reproduce the divine Spirit whence he comes.

We have spoken of the three aspects of Spirit, symbolised in those Trinities that we find in all the great religions, whether living or dead; that triple nature of Deity is reproduced in the triple nature of the human Spirit, and so we have seen that the Spirit has three aspects  - each aspect corresponding to a similar aspect in the Divine - man verily made in the image of God, and unfolding one after another these divine aspects which lie within him.

Looking thus at the human Spirit as a seed of Divinity, we realise the full meaning of those words [57] in the Bhagavad-Gita, spoken by Shri Krshna, when He is speaking as God Himself, and when He declares: “A portion of myself, a living Spirit, sent out into the world of matter”. It is as a “portion of God” that we should ever regard man; a “divine fragment” he has been called by Mabel Collins in that exquisite prose poem, The Light on the Path; a spark, he has also been called, of a fire, and he is gradually to burn up into a flame, into the likeness of that divine Fire, of that parent Deity. So we may trace his unfolding as his bodies evolve, and realise that to complete the theory of evolution we must understand the unfolding of the divine Spirit as man.

Looking back at these three aspects, we find the first, that which reflects the Power aspect of God, as Will in the human Spirit, Will the manifestation of Power. But we realise that in man this is limited, whereas in Deity it is unlimited, and only slowly and gradually, by many an effort, by many a struggle, can this germ of Will in man develop into the Power aspect of God. Then, as the second aspect of Wisdom, or SELF-consciousness - that of the Son or the Preserver in the various Trinities­ we find that limited in the human Spirit as SELF-realisation. Just as you find in the Christian Scripture that the Christ is spoken of as the Image of God, as showing forth the splendour of the Supreme, so do we find in the human Spirit that it is in the realisation of his [58] own Divinity that the unfolding of the second aspect in the human Spirit is to be found. And it is that which is spoken of as the ‘Christ-­aspect’ in the human Spirit, answering, in this reproduction of Divinity, to the Image of the Father in the Trinity divine. Then the third aspect, that of Activity, of the creative Spirit ­in the Hindu view the Creator of a universe­ - that we see reproduced in the human Spirit as the creative intelligence, or the Intellect. For it is by intellect that man works on the outer world; it is by the creative power of intelligence that he makes for himself, as it were, a world, even as the divine Spirit bodies Himself forth in worlds and systems. And this creative intellect it is, which in its highest aspect we know as genius, genius which buds forth in wondrous forms the ideas which within the intelligence have come into shape. And so we see in the human Spirit, Will, SELF-realisation, and creative Intelligence, all in germ, or seed in man, to be unfolded gradually in the course of evolution.

In our further study, however, we find that this unfolding of Divinity in man is not im­mediate, and it does not show itself in the very beginning of the path of evolution. Matter in its denser form is too little plastic, too little responsive, to answer fully to the moulding powers of the divine Spirit, who seeks therein for full embodiment. And so the Spirit first reflects himself in matter - that is, he puts down [59] into matter his own divine powers, but those appear externally, when clothed in this denser matter, in feebler form, as the reflection may be said to be feebler than that which casts it. And as we know these aspects of the Spirit in man, we know them first through the denser body in which they are clothed, so that much of their power is shrouded, much of their divinity is lost to sight. As you might have a flame within a lamp, and then surrounding that with glasses of various colours, you would find the flame grow dimmer when looked at from without, and take on the hue of one or another glass, so does this white light of Divinity, as the denser bodies are placed around it, lose its effulgence, take on colours due to the vehicles, or the coverings, and not due to itself. So we find Will in man repro­duced down here on the physical plane as that of determination to action, the effective desire which impels to act. And we find the SELF-­realisation of the Spirit reflected down here in our emotions, of which the basic human emotion is love; love, trying in the lower worlds to draw the separated selves together, is the re­flection of that SELF-realisation which knows all selves as one.

And the creative Intellect, bodying itself forth in the denser mental matter, shows itself as the concrete mind, with its powers divided off into mental faculties, so that its creative power becomes what we call imagination - the [60] image-making faculty; so that that wide know­ledge of the past which belonged to the aspect of the intelligence in man and the knowledge of the future also which the past connotes, that in man becomes memory and anticipation, and we find them as faculties in the concrete mind; the direct vision of Truth, growing out of the fact that intelligence has the nature of knowledge, becomes the faculty of reason, of logical induc­tion and deduction, whereby the vision of truth is gained by following the links of a chain of reasoning instead of by the direct vision of the emancipated intellect. So that these great powers in the creative Intellect are narrowed down to be separated faculties in this lower or concrete mind in man. And in this limitation lies the possibility of our coming into touch with matter, in order that out of matter the nourishment of experience may be drawn by which the Spirit shall be able to unfold his power and the inward-turned germ or seed of Divinity shall become the outward-turned, the expanded, blossom, the manifested God in the world of men.

We need not pause on the long evolution of these lower reflections of the Spirit. All that we need notice with regard to their growth is that they are constantly drawn out by the attractions of the outer world, and that in all the objects of the world God is ever hiding Himself, in order that by that attractive power of Himself He may draw forth the hidden divine powers which [61] lie within the germ of Him implanted in the human form. For all that there is of attractive­ness in the lower world, all that there is of beauty, of lovableness, all that there is of strength and splendour, all that there is which is worthy to be struggled for and grasped, all this is but the attractiveness of God, hiding Himself within the form, in order that He may win His children to make the efforts which are needed for the unfolding of the Divine within themselves. Hence to speak against the world, with all its attractiveness, with all its allurements, is a sign of ignorance, ignorance of the real function of the world in the evolution of man. Do you suppose that it would have been made so desirable, if it were not meant to stimulate desire? Do you suppose it would have been made so attractive, unless it had been intended to be full of attraction for the lives which therein were planted by God?  The whole object of the beauties of the world, of its attractions, of its desirable things, is to draw out the child Spirit in man, so that by putting out his force, his energy, he may gradually, by exercise, develop these powers and make them what they ought to be - the reproduction of Divinity. Hence it is not well when you are dealing with all the earlier stages of evolution, to discredit the world as though it were to be shunned rather than to be studied, and the experiences hidden therein to be gathered. It is meant to give experience for [62] the unfolding of Spirit; it is as the soil, full of various forms of nourishment which the tree is to draw in by its roots, in order that it may grow and develop in the higher air. It is true that the prizes of the world are but toys, rightly looked at. It is true that all that the world can give ends in dissatisfaction after a time. But how foolish would be the mother who would refuse to attract the child by a glittering toy, in order that the child may put out his strength, in order that he may try to move his limbs, in order that in the effort to reach the toy he may make the effort to walk, and, even if he falls, pick himself up again and renew the struggle, because of the attractiveness of the toy that is dangled before his eyes. And so with us, as children, God dangles His toys before our eyes that we may make an effort to gain them, but the value of the toy lies in the effort to gain it and not in the toy itself. And so we ever find that the moment we have grasped it, it breaks into pieces in our hands, and then another attraction comes forth to induce us to make fresh efforts. So year after year, nay, life after life, man by struggle develops his powers, and at last reaches the point where Divinity itself may begin to be manifested within him. And so to the utter­most we should cultivate every power that we have in the lower world, until it loses its attractiveness because a glimpse of something higher has been found. There, again, that [63] wonderful little book often called the Scripture of Yoga, the Bhagavad-Gita, gives us the secret of the time when the unfolding, the manifestation of the God, is ready to begin. It tells us that a time comes when a man begins to understand that these objects that attract him are not all he wants, and that then he begins to turn away from them; and, as the book goes on to say, then the objects them­selves “turn away from the abstemious dweller in the body”. When we have come to the point that we see that they are not what we really want, and we begin to abstain from them, then they turn away from us, for their work for us is over. They lose their attractiveness; they no longer are able to allure us; they turn away because their lesson has been learned, because all that they can teach us has been acquired. And then the Gita teaches us that the very desire for them passes away when once the Supreme is seen. For truly when that perfect beauty, that perfect splendour, that perfect lovableness, have once risen as the sun over the horizon of our minds, then the broken reflec­tions in the world must needs lose their attractiveness; for the eyes, dazzled with the sun, can see no lesser light. And then comes a period which is very trying to the evolving man. He has lost taste for the things of the world; he no longer cares for wealth, nor power, nor fame. He has tried them all, and he finds they fail him; they are naught; they [64] bring him no lasting good; and so he feels what is called Dispassion, the lack of desire; and in losing the desire for the things of the world, there is a sense as though he were losing life itself; for life has shown itself through desire; life has grown by the gratifica­tion of desire; life has developed by the realisation of desire; and when all the objects of desire seem unsatisfying, it is as though the very life of man were fading away, and utter dissatisfaction came down. The beauty of the earth becomes grey and cold and dead. It is a time of sore trouble, a time almost of despair; the lower is gone and the higher is not yet glimpsed. For it is the law that the higher cannot definitely show itself until the lower has lost its power to charm. And there is this interval in which life seems worthless; the man says “Is life worth living?” It is full of disappointment, of sorrow and of pain. Almost a disgust of life grows up; and then the words seem to sound out from the darkness, those strange words spoken by the Christ: “He that loveth his life shall lose it; he that loseth his life shall find it unto life eternal”. It is the first word of hope that, in the losing of life, eternal life perchance is to be found. But in those moments of deep depression, well-nigh, as I said, of despair, it does not seem as though this hint applied to ourselves. We would quote it to others, but we do not feel we dare to quote it to ourselves. We feel as though [65] we were exceptional, as though for us this word of comfort had no meaning. Yet it is a word which is ever true for man, the truth that when the shadow fails, it is because we have turned to the light, and the shadow is behind us and can no longer be seen.

And then there comes the time when a new stir of life in the Spirit itself begins to make itself felt through the bodies of matter, when the germ of spiritual life is quickened as the first throbbings of it are felt within us. Very often before that comes, everything else has been struck away that we had loved. Some great catastrophe in the lower life often heralds the feeling of the higher. Friends fall away; the most beloved, perhaps, dies and leaves the world empty and our heart forlorn; and it is in the moment of that midnight, when not only the ordinary things have lost their savour, but the dearest seem veiled in darkness, it is then that the moment comes for the birth of the Christ within us, for the first dawning of that spiritual consciousness which shall gradually increase until it supplants all else.

And the man has come up to this through a very definite Path, a Path which is traced for us in the great religions of the world. You find it in Hinduism, in Buddhism, in Christianity, and more especially, I think, you will find a careful and scientific description of it in some of the Roman Catholic books where this path of holiness is described. I have not found in [66] Protestant literature so full a description of its stages as you find from the pens of the Mystics of the Roman Catholic Church. There you find the stages given just as they are given in  the East, save that it is divided into three stages instead of four; but that is only a matter  of subdivision, unimportant, for it does not touch the primary marks and facts. The Roman Catholics call the first stage the Path of Purifi­cation; the second stage is the Path of Illumination, and the Path of Union is the third. Those are the stages in which the Christ-life in man is divided in the Occultism of the Roman Catholic Church. But Occultism is the same wherever you find it; it does not matter whether you take a Hindu book or a Buddhist book or a Christian book, provided that it is an occult treatise which deals with the realities of the spiritual life in man. All you need to do is to translate the terms into terms familiar to yourself; you will find that the stages described are identical, for there is but one Way of the Cross, there is but one method for the development of the Christ-life in man. In Hinduism and Buddhism they speak of the Path of Purification, or of Purgation, as it is sometimes called, as the Probationary Path - the path that prepares the man for the birth of the Divine within him. For it is necessary to purify before that birth can take place. The Temple must be sanctified, conse­crated, before the God can be manifested therein. [67]

And so in ancient and in modern times alike it has been declared that purification was the first step to the birth of the Christ, and that when that step had been accomplished, then  the sanctification or illumination begins which lightens unto the perfect day.

We spoke yesterday of the Christ in history[2], but those marks to which I drew your attention in the Christ in history are to be seen also in the birth and growth of the Christ-aspect in man, in the human Spirit. For that birth which is pure and immaculate, that birth of a Virgin without stain of sin; that is the symbol everlasting of the birth of the Christ in the purified heart, the birth of the Christ-aspect in the human Spirit. Pure must be the form into which that Spirit is born. It is what technically is called the First Initiation, and in the Gospel story it is the birth of Jesus in the stable at Bethlehem which stands as the symbol of that in the great Drama of Initiation, through which the man must pass on his way to Divinity manifested. In some of the old Christian writings, the word ‘stable’ is used, but some­times ‘cave’. Jesus is born in a cave, and that links us to a well-known ancient phrase in Hinduism, where it exhorts the man to search into the cave, to look within the cave, for there is something there that ought to be inquired into, yea, verily, which ought to be known. [68] It is the cave of Initiation of every Mystic writer, and the cave is the purified heart of man, where, among the purified emotions from which all taint of evil has been purged away, the realisation of the Christ-life arises in the human Spirit, and Christ Himself is born within the heart of man. It is an idea familiar to every reader of the New Testament. Did not S. Paul say of his Christian friends, baptised and communicant, “My little children, of whom I travail in birth again until Christ be formed in you?” For it is the Christ within rather than the Christ without who is the true Saviour of man. Only when He is born within the human Spirit have we reached what is called salvation, for only the Christ in man can be triumphant over death, and His birth in the human Spirit is the sign of that eternal life. We speak of that as the first of the great Initiations. Five of these have to be passed through by man as the human Spirit unfolds these higher aspects.

The first, as I have said, typified by the life of the Christ as given in the Gospels, is the birth. Then the man learns certain great truths which remove from him for evermore ignorance of that which has been completely acquired. He learns by SELF-realisation that there is no such thing as separateness, that each human being is part of One Life; that each human being inheres in One Existence; that the forms are separate, but the life is one. [69] And just as you might have a number of vessels, open to the sky above, vessels in which the sides separated each vessel from those around it, but all alike were open to the sun, and the rays of the sun could pour in through the open mouths of the vessels, and one sun by its beams could lighten and warm the whole, so is it with the human Spirit. The human Spirit is a vessel ever open to the Sun of God above; the bodies are the sides of the vessels that separate apparently one from another, but they are all open to the one Sun of the Spirit, which can fill them all alike; and  when the man has risen up into the spiritual world, he looks down upon all the forms, and they are no longer closed forms but open, no longer separating forms but all open to the light, which is seen as one and indivisible. And it is therefore one of the powers of the  Christ that He can pour His life down into any of the forms that lie below Him, for they are all open to the Christ-Spirit, and His life can fill them; there is no obstruction above, though there may be division below.

And that lesson must be learned ere the man can go further. He must not only theoretically accept, but practically realise that there is no separation between himself and his fellow-men. And then he must gain that SELF-realisation which makes himself know himself in the past as one through all his lives, one through the many births that have brought him into the [70] world, one through the many deaths by which he has left this mortal existence. He must realise his own oneness through all the many lives that stretch behind him, so that to him re-incarnation is knowledge and not belief, so that he realises, he does not only hope. And he has to learn also - it is his third great lesson, ere he can go onwards to the ‘baptism’ that is the second of the great Initiations - he must learn that all religions come from God, that all their forms are equally useful to those who need form, and equally useless to those who have grown beyond form, and who, instead of in the letter, live in the Spirit. When the man once knows his way into the eternal life, he needs no longer the bridges of form that once carried him over the apparent gulf, and so he realises at once the use and the use­lessness of forms - their infinite value until the reality is known, and then their superfluity, their needlessness, when the reality is within his grasp.

Having learned these three lessons, he takes the second step in the Christ-life in man,  typified in the Gospel story by the Baptism, when, as you remember, the “Spirit of God” came down and “abode upon” Jesus. After that Initiation it is his work to draw down the higher into the lower, so that the lower may be illuminated, filled with the light that is above. He must bring down the knowledge that in the higher world he gains into the [71] lower form where it can be used for the helping of man. He must bring down the powers of the Intellect into the concrete mind and merge the lower in the higher so that he may use the unified intelligence in the service of man.

One by one he must bring down, by effort and by struggle, all the powers of the Spirit that matter had hitherto hampered, for his work is to redeem matter and make it the free vehicle of Spirit. And the work between the second and the third Initiation is the spiritualisation of matter, for only in that spiritualisation can the redemption of matter lie. Then he passes on to the third, typified in the Gospel story by the Transfiguration on the Mount, where the God within has become so refulgent through the purified matter that he shines forth visibly in the eyes of those disciples whose eyes were opened to behold. Then he realises to the full the Divinity that is unfolding within him, and it is then,