MYSTICISM/PART 3

 

III.

 

 

 

THE CHRIST-IDEA.

 

 

 

 

 

FRIENDS:

 

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

 

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

 

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

 

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

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

 

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

 

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

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

 

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

 

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

 

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

 

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

 

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

 

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

 

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

 

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

 

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

 

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

 

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

 

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

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

 

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

 

And now think for a moment of him in His historical aspect. The Christ in all times and in all ages has stood out as man in two characters - one as Teacher, the other as what is called Miracle-Worker - that is as One who knows the laws of Nature far more fully than the people of His time know them and so utilising those laws, and utilising them far the benefit of human kind, He performs many a mighty work, but still ever a work which is done by law, a work which comes within the mighty scheme of Nature; for there are many powers that as yet you know not of; and these, as the Spirit shines out more strongly will come within your grasp. There are glimpses of it from time to time when, by the exercise of faith by a believer, some wondrous cure is performed; there are traces of it when from time to time, not by faith but by knowledge of these at present hidden powers, some great work of healing is wrought to bring relief to a sufferer and joy to those around. But there are many powers hidden in the scheme of Nature that as yet you know not, every one of which shall come within reach of humanity as humanity climbs nearer to Divinity. And if the Divine Man shows out the powers sometimes, it is as an encouragement and an inspiration to men so blinded by flesh  that they know not their own divinity; and because they know not the splendour of their  birthright, they have contempt for their own nature, not realising what is hidden within it. But every Christ of the past is only a prophecy and a promise of the man of the future, the man who, unfolding the Divine powers of the Spirit, shall be master over physical nature as well as over super-physical, and, by gradually spiritualising with his own life the matter around him, shall render it obedient to his will and ductile to his power. It is the evolution which lies in front of which the world’s Christs are the promise and the realisation.

 

I do not think that those who have studied carefully are likely themselves to be led astray along the lines of the so-called Higher Criticism, some of which would lead them to deny the existence of the physical Christ. He was a Man among men, around whom legends gathered, around whom stories were collected. He enters the list like His great forerunners, a man treading the familiar paths of earth, and living among the family and the people to whom by birth He belonged.

 

But that aspect of the Christ is the least important, the least interesting. Far more important, it seems to me, is the aspect of the Christ in which you see His kinship in story and in legend with all the Christs that have trodden the human way before Him. And that is ever in connection with what is called the legend of the Sun - the Sun, because all things in lower Nature symbolise the higher - in which the progress of the sun through the year symbolises the great Life of God made Man lived for human helping. Do you realise that all the things in lower nature are but symbols and shadows, reflections, if you like, of the profound truths of the spiritual world, objectified in matter for the helping of men. Men have studied, beginning at the wrong end, when they think the objects in Nature were originally worshipped; the objects in Nature are the shadows here of the great spiritual verities which lie at the base of every great religion of the world. The truths are m the spiritual world, the shadows in this material world in which we live. God is not the sun, but God is the life of the sun, and the sun is the reflection of a fragment of the Life of God; and so the sun, as he goes his annual course, is figuring out and showing forth the real Life of God in the story of the World-Teachers who come to earth over and over again. And what men call the Solar Myth is really the expression of a spiritual truth, re-lived among men by every great Teacher who comes to illuminate the world. And so you ever have the story of the birth encircled with difficulty, with danger, with menace and with threat; for it is the sun at the shortest day of his life, encircled with the winter dangers, and menaced in those days by storm and mist and fog.  And you see him climbing slowly through the spring months; born at the winter solstice, born ever of a virgin and His symbol in any religion the sign of the Zodiac which was in the ascendant when he was born into the world. And so sometimes the sacred animal, that ever symbolises the Man-God in a religion, is the bull as it was in Egypt, is the lamb as it became in Christendom. The fishes also you find as symbol, and according to the date of your religion is the sign of the Zodiac that is the symbol of the God Man for that special faith. And so by such calculations you may be helped to the date of the religion, to alternative dates going back by thousands and thousands of years; for you can only say the religion may have been born at such and such a date, or at the equivalent point tens of thousands of years before. And so you find among the Hindus that you can calculate to find out these dates, because in the Hindu ancient stories they give the chart of the heaven as it was when the hero of the tale was born.

 

And so you find this idea in the myth, that man is to become united with the God who embodies the myth, as I spoke of Osiris, and the dead men becoming Osiris, and of the Christian united to his Christ on the other side of death.

And that leads us gently onwards to the still deeper view in which, leaving the symbols of the sun’s course in the heavens, we come on to the evolution of the Divine Man in every evolving human being, whose human evolution will not be over until he has trodden the road which is trodden before him by the Christs of great religions. There is the profoundest interest for all of us, the birth of the Christ in the Spirit of man, the unfolding of the Christ in the human life. And we find that exqui­sitely embodied in the story of the Christ of Christendom, as you have it in the gospels, where the great events of the life typify the great Initiations on the Path, every one of which means a new expansion of conscious­ness to the unfolding consciousness of man, and each of which marks a stage lived out in the life of the Christ, lived out in the life of the man who is climbing towards Divinity. You have the first great Initiation typified in the birth of the Christ, the birth from a virgin - for that is ever regarded as the pure birth, untouched by earthly father - into that kingdom of heaven in which the Christ life begins. And then you come to the Baptism, when the Spirit of God descends upon the Beloved Son and abides on Him, and there you have the second of the great Initiations in which the work of the Initiate is to bring down into his human consciousness the Divine consciousness which broods ever above him, so that he may know himself in this and in the other subtler and higher worlds. And then onward to the next stage, the Transfiguration on the Mount, on which the disciple, ever extending in his conscious­ness, reaches the point at which it stretches upwards and around him and he knows him­self irradiated with the majesty of God. And then onwards from the Mount of Transfigura­tion, where he realises his own Divinity, down into the valley of suffering, onwards to Jerusalem, onwards to the Garden of  Gethsemane, to the mockery of the High Priest and of the Ruler, bearing the cross as He faints beneath its weight, nailed to the Cross with all His possessions stripped from Him, going from stage to stage until the last darkness descends upon Him in which the human nature cried out in its agony: “My God, my God, why hast Thou forsaken me?” And in the very moment of that final darkness He finds the Divine Arms nearer than they ever were before, finds that the loss of the outer God is the discovery of the inner, and in that discovery the words go forth: “It is finished!” and the man has completed his pilgrimage. The time comes when He is entering into God, and then comes the fifth, the great Initiation, the Liberation of the human Spirit, typified in the resurrection and the ascension of the Christ, when the God who found Himself upon the Cross, takes to Himself His own Divine power and becomes the Master of life and death, He who has in His hands the keys of heaven and hell; for there is no height of glory into which He cannot rise into communion with deity, there is no depth of hell of human misery, into which He cannot descend in the helping of His fettered brethren upon earth.

 

And so that story of the Christ as told in your own gospels, means to the Occultist the mystical story of the unfolding of God in every man. And so it was that S. Paul saw it, and gave you many a hint, many a suggestion; which might show you that the Christ was not only one splendid Figure, but typified the unfolding God, the divine Spirit, in every one of us, for do you not read m the teaching of S. Paul: “My little children, in whom I travail again, until Christ be formed in you”. Do you not read him saying over and over again that you must be crucified with Christ did he not declare that he himself had passed through that mystical crucifixion? Did he not go on to say that “the life that I now live in the flesh I live by the faith of the Son of God”, and did he not say: “Not I live, but Christ liveth in me?” To live the Christ-life while still in the bondage of the flesh, to pass through all those stages of unfolding divine humanity and to know that the Christs of the race have trodden that Path before you, have reached that goal which you in time shall reach - that is the true salvation; that is the  inner reality of mystical Christianity; not to be saved by a Christ outside you, but to be  uplifted by the Christ within you; to become the very Christ Himself in your own life for the outcast, the helpless and the despairing; to gain that divinest of all powers, to pour into them your help, and into them your life, and to know that the reward for every pain that you have suffered in your human pilgrimage is the power to help the fainting children of men, to raise them a little nearer to the life which is Divine. That is the true meaning of the Ascension; that ascending into God yourself you are present to give help to every child of man, for is it not said the Christ is but the firstborn among many brethren? And you ought to be His brethren as you name His Name; you think too ill of yourselves to claim your birthright, and you deem it blasphemy to try to realise that which your own scriptures proclaim. But will you not learn to live your religion, as you say you believe it. Will you not cease to call others heretics, for the worst heresy is the heresy of the life, and not the heresy of the brain, the heresy that denies that the Christ-life is possible for man, and calls itself a miserable sinner when it ought to be climbing into a saint of Divinity. You think too ill of your­selves, you think too humbly of yourselves, you who name the Name of Christ, the  Supreme Teacher of the world: rise then, I, who am not Christian, would pray you, to the  height of your great calling; recognise in yourselves the Christ as some of us recog­nise Those who are one with Him but are known by other names; for names make no difference where the realities veiled by the names are one; it matters not whether you call yourself Hindu, Buddhist, Christian, Mussulman; all men are sons of God, and are unfolding the Deity within them. Take whatever name helps you most. The mother does not murmur when the lips of her babe pronounce her name in childish fashion; it is the love which appeals to her; and be sure that the Christ, and all Christs, recognise those as brethren in whom Their own likeness shines out most perfectly, and that, as you become a Christ m reality to the helpless amongst you, so shall the great Christ recognise you as brethren, and not be ashamed that you wear His Name when you try to live His life.

 

 

 

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THE MAN-IDEA