Chapter V: Part II: The Place of Phenomena in the Theosophical Society (2)

Meanwhile the Democracy was growing, and numbers were beginning to claim their power, until the people, having seen how badly Kings and priests could rule, thought that they could not, after all, do very much worse themselves, if they seized authority by the power of numbers, and took the helm of the States, of the Nations, into their own rough and untrained grip. And so has risen in the modern life of Europe the power, as it is called, of the Democracy. Practically, at the present time, Democracy may be said to be on its trial. It cannot claim so far to be a very splendid success, but its trial is not yet over, and many a year may yet lie before it, in order that the world may have an object-lesson to show that the only true authority is the authority of Wisdom, and not the authority of numbers; and that it is not possible for humanity to take its next step onwards until it has managed to draw out of the lessons of the past and of the present some way of blending, some way of uniting, the different experiences through which it has passed. For all who study the world's unfolding and believe that this world is not alone, but is a part linked with other worlds, and that other beings above humanity take their share in humanity's evolution--all who thus look at history and see the powers that lie behind the veil and that pull the strings of those whom we call kings, and statesmen, and generals, and the mighty ones of earth, they know that no great human experiment can be void of its value, and no great human experiment but has some fruit of wisdom to be gathered from it. So that no wise man, no thoughtful Theosophist, should look with a feeling of repulsion and anger on the experiments that are being made all over the world to-day in the effort of the nations to rule themselves by numbers rather than by wisdom. For it is a necessary experience. Only in this fashion can the lower mind complete its evolution and be ready to give up its sceptre to that Pure Reason which is to be the mark of the Sixth Race, which is to find its expression in the polity of that coming Race. Out of all these experiments we are to learn, out of all successes and all failures we are to spell out, the lesson whereon the next civilisation will be built, whereby its foundation will gradually be laid. For if one sees the Theosophical Society aright, it is as one of the builders of that coming time, one of the builders of the civilisation that has not yet really dawned on earth, the civilisation of the Sixth Root Race, with the experiments that will go before it in the Sixth and Seventh sub-races of the Fifth. For these experiments take long in the making, and, as a great teacher once said: "Time is no object with us." There is plenty of time for all the experiments, and all the blunders, and all the failures; and all the successes of the future will grow out of these, because every failure rightly seen is the seed of a coming success, and only by the failures that we make in our ignorance may the plant of wisdom be sown, and presently flower and bear fruit for the feeding of the nations. So that there is time enough, and no need for impatience, when we see the blunders of our various democratic governments. But there is much need that thoughtful people should take care so to see the signs of the time, and so to understand the forces at work, that the same blunder be not made in the days of the present as was made at the close of the eighteenth century in France; for there also was a time when an effort was made for a great step forward, a step too big, apparently, to be possible of being then taken, a step which only caused the drowning of the forward movement in blood, and has thrown France backward, and not forward as some people suppose; for ever since that time she has had a cancer at the heart of her, and no effort that has been made has borne due fruit. Nay, it is even possible that that was her opportunity in which she failed, and that the opportunity will have to pass to other peoples, to be worked out by other hands.

Looking at the democracies of to-day, we see that both the great powers are rejected, King and priest alike, royalty reduced to a mere puppet, priesthood looked on with suspicion and with hatred; and in both cases one is bound to admit that there is much justification, for they are the result of the harm that unbridled power in Church and in State alike have wrought to the people, who are now revolting against both. But the revolt is only a passing thing. Humanity does not really change; only passing manifestations of it change; and though the passing manifestations be counted by centuries, what is that in the length of a day counted by myriads of years, and to peoples who are spiritual intelligences unfolding their powers in humanity? Kingship and priesthood are mighty powers, and the need for them deep-rooted in the nature of humanity. Only on the upward path they are different from what they were on the path of descent, and the way in which those are to be shaped and moulded and again made mighty, that will be the answer of human experience after it has proved the rule of ignorance to be a mistake and a failure. Gradually, in some way that as yet we do not see, a way will be found of discovering the wise, who alone have the right to rule. For there is no authority for the intelligence, there is no authority for the free intellect of man, save the authority of Wisdom, to which the intellect bows because it is itself in flower. And those who develop the intelligence of men, as humanity is beginning to evolve its intelligence, they will only find their Kings and Priests where they see a wisdom greater than their own, a knowledge which transcends theirs, but is the promise of what they themselves in the future should become. And out of all the birth-throes of the present, and the ugly shapes which humanity takes on, will come the fairer birth of Wisdom, when again it shall sit on the combined throne of King and Priest. For it is necessary that human life should regain its unity, and that again the Spirit shall be known to be master, and the body its instrument, its tool, its expression. And on the upward-climbing arc we have again to come to the same levels that we passed in our downward-going arc of the ages of the past. In the half circle we had first the Priest-King; and then the two side by side, co-operators; and then the separation and the rivalry; and, finally, an evil junction to oppress the ignorant and the poor. And slowly we shall have to climb on the path where Spirit is manifesting more and more, and matter is becoming more and more obedient, until each of those stages is again seen in the history of humanity, and until, at the end, Spirit shall be lord unchallenged, and matter obedient servant, carrying out his will. And in the humanity of the great Sixth Race in which Buddhi, or Pure Reason, is to be the mark, in which Wisdom will be the shaper of humanity's plans, and the strength of matter will be used in order to carry them out, in those days there will be the building-up of the dual authority once more, and the shaping of it to diviner ends than even in those early days of the infant humanity. And in those days, again, ruler and priest shall be one, until at last the unity shall be realised in the life of those who are to accomplish their human evolution upon earth; until finally in each spiritual individual these two characteristics are unfolded, and each man is King and Priest, uniting the two phases in his own individuality, and learning, in that dual power, to become the servant of those who are less evolved than himself. You see a touch of that when the Christian religion was sent out into the world, a glimpse of the splendid ideal when the Apostle, writing to his infant Church, spoke of them as "Kings and priests unto God"; in each individual this identity is to be at last achieved, so that no outer rule is any longer necessary, the inner rule being enough. That unity will mark the closing scenes of life on earth in each of those whose human evolution will be finished, who will have to pass on into other worlds when they shall have united again each of these in their own persons, and shall use that twofold power for the training of the humanity below them, ascending towards the point which they shall have gained and shall occupy.

Such the vast sweep of humanity's evolution: from Spirit, through densest matter, upward-climbing again to Spirit, bearing with it all the powers that by the experience in matter it has gained. Such the great sweep, and the great history. What relation has that to our little Society and our little movement? Some would be inclined to say: "None; no relation at all. You cannot bring down into so small a microcosm those great principles shown out in their working in a macrocosm." And yet if you and I, in our tiny personalities, repeat in miniature the life of the Logos in the vast sweep of His creative activity, who shall say that in a movement such as ours there is not similarly a retracing of the lines along which humanity at large has to grow? And who shall say whether we may not understand our movement better, and guide it more wisely, if we recognise these correspondences of the great growth of the world to the small growth of our Movement--a world-reflection in a tiny mirror? For it is no true humility to lessen too much the varied operations of the Great White Lodge in the world of men, any more than it is a true humility for the individual to be ashamed to claim his divine inheritance, and look upon himself as a "mere worm of earth." The men or women who only feel themselves to be of the earth, and not of Deity, their lives become more vulgar and common than they ought to be; for it is a great thing to realise possibilities and to see correspondences, and to take out of them their inspiring value, their invigorating force. And just as you and I have the right to say that we are Gods in the making, and that there is nothing in the great power of the LOGOS that does not lie hidden in germ within ourselves, just as we have the right to say that, as man best understands himself when he knows himself divine and realises the possibilities within him, and sees the road to Deity which he is to tread, so is every spiritual movement great in proportion to the realisation of its one-ness with the great world-movement, and small and petty when the men and women who compose it can only keep their eyes on the muck of the earth instead of looking up to the crown of stars that the angel holds over their head. So that I do not fear to provoke a false pride, but rather to get rid of a false humility, when I ask you to see in this Movement, which belongs to the Great Lodge and is its child, to see in it the same forces at work that you see working in the world-history, and to realise that here also correspondences exist, and that we may guide our Movement most worthily by seeing those correspondences and utilising them for the common good.

So let us pause now, after these high flights, in the little valley in which we live, and see whether in the Theosophical Society any such process of events may be seen as has been played on the great world theatre, in the drama of evolving humanity. For mind! we have no meaning unless we are related to that, and our Movement has no sense unless it retraces the steps of the great world drama, as every great spiritual movement does, from the time of its birth to the time of its passing away, and its incarnation in some other form. I do not claim it for our Society only, but for all great spiritual movements--churches, religions, call them what you will.

Now, we began our Movement as humanity began its education. There was no difference between spiritual and temporal. The whole Society was regarded as a spiritual movement; and if you go back to those early days, and read the earliest statements, you will find it said that this Society existed in what then were called three Sections: First, Second, and Third. The First Section was the Brotherhood, the Elder Brothers of Humanity; the Second, those who were striving to lead the higher, the more spiritual life, and were in training for the purpose; and the Third Section made up the bulk of the Society. Those three Sections were the Theosophical Society. So that it began on a very lofty level; and its First Section, the Elder Brothers, Those whom we speak of as Masters, They were regarded as forming the First Section of the Society, and as part of it; and the Society has linked closely the Second and Third Sections under the First, as in the days when the Gods walked with men, in the early story of humanity. And They came and went far more freely then than later, and mingled more with the Society, taking a more active part in this work; and it is wonderful to read some of the old letters of the time, and the close and intimate knowledge shown by those great Teachers of the details of the work of the Society, even of what was written about it in an Indian newspaper, and what ought to be answered, and so on. And the Society grew, became more numerous, and spread in many lands; and naturally as it spread, many of these ties somewhat weakened so far as the Society, as a whole, was concerned--not weakened with individuals, but somewhat weakened with the Body at large. And so things went on and on, until the Society passed through the same stage through which humanity had passed when the Priest-Kings entirely disappeared, and when those words were spoken by one of the Great Ones: "The Society has liberated itself from our grasp and influence, and we have let it go; we make no unwilling slaves.... Out of the three Objects the second alone is attended to; it is no longer either a Brotherhood, nor a body over the face of which broods the Spirit from beyond the Great Range." And when that time was well established a change was made in the organisation of the Society. It was no longer, so to speak, one and indivisible, but two parts were made--Exoteric and Esoteric; and, as you know, for some time the Colonel fought against that, thinking it meant an unwise and dangerous division of authority in the Society, until, as he was coming over here with his mind in opposition to the proposal that H.P.B. should form the Esoteric Section, he received, on board the steamer on which he travelled, a letter from his Master telling him to carry out what H.P.B. wished; and, ever obedient as he was, for when his Master spoke he knew no hesitation, when he arrived here in England he did what he had been told, and authorised the formation of what was then called the Esoteric Section of the Theosophical Society. You can read all this for yourselves; it is all in print. Then came that distinct cleavage of Exoteric and Esoteric--the two heads, H. S. Olcott and H.P.B., one wielding the temporal and the other the spiritual authority in the Society. It meant that the Society had ceased to be the spiritual vehicle it was in the earlier days. It meant, as was printed at that time, that some of the members wished to carry on the Society on its original lines, and so they formed themselves into this Section under her, on the original lines. So it went on, like that time in the history of humanity, in order that certain faculties might grow and become strong, and that the spiritual side for a time might seem apart, and the other might go its own way unruled. Many difficulties grew out of it, but still they were not insuperable--a certain clashing of authorities from time to time, and certain jealousy between the one and the other. These things were the inevitable concomitants of the separation, of the differences between the spiritual and temporal sides, the Spirit and the body, as it were. So things went on until the President passed away. When H.P.B. left us, she left me in charge of her work, as her colleague did in Adyar lately, thus uniting again the two powers, the two authorities, in a single person.

Now, what does it mean to the Society? That is the question for us. What is it to bring forth in our Movement? Ill or well? It is only possible, at this beginning of the road, to point out the two things that _may_ happen. For the Society and its President together will have to settle which of the two shall come. It may be that They, who from behind look on, may foresee what is coming; or it may be, as it often is, that They also are not able completely to say what shall come out of the clashing wills of men, differing views, possible antagonisms. Two possibilities there clearly are before us, either of which, I suggest, may come. For you and for me it is to decide which shall come. And I can only tell you how it seems to me, and you must judge and act as you think right. For at last our Society, like humanity, has reached the point when the individual must do his duty, and must no longer be a child guided entirely from without, but a man with the God within co-operating with the God without. Hence it is not a question for any to decide for us: we have to decide it for ourselves. And as I say, I can only put to you what seem to me the two possibilities. Let me take the bad possibility first. It may be that I, in whose hands these two powers now are placed, shall prove too weak to bear that burden, too blind to walk along that difficult path. It may be that I shall err on the one side or on the other, either making the Society too exoteric and empty, a material thing, or, on the other hand, pressing too far the spiritual side, with all that that means. It may be that the task is too great, and that the time has not come. I recognise that as possible; for in all questions of peoples, persons, and times, experiments may be made which it is known will fail, in order that out of the failure fresh wisdom may be gathered, and it may be that this shall be a failure. And if so it matters not, for out of that failure some higher good will spring. That is the conviction of those who know that the Self is ever in us, and that the Self can never perish; so that it matters not what catastrophe may come, provided faith in the Self remains secure with His endless possibilities of recovery, and greater powers of manifestation. And it may quite well be that, in hands as weak and knowledge as limited as mine, failure will meet this great experiment which the Masters are making, and that we shall find that neither President nor Society is fit to take that step forward, are both still too childish, not sufficiently mature, and therefore not able to tread the path which is the path upwards to the spiritual life, when the organisation shall again become but the mere outside veiling of the spiritual life, carrying the message of regeneration to the world, and the birth of a new civilisation. That is one possibility that should be faced. And the other?

The other is that we may permit the Great Ones to be sufficiently in touch with our little selves to send Their forces through us, and that Their life shall become the life of the Society; that out of this rejoining of spiritual and temporal a greater spirituality shall circulate in every vein and vessel of the Society, and it shall become again truly a vehicle of the Masters of the Wisdom. It may be that it is preparing for a greater and a nobler life, making the place ready for some greater one to come, who shall worthily and strongly wield the power that I am bound to wield too weakly, but yet, perhaps, strongly enough to make that preparation possible. Perhaps you and I together are strong enough and wise enough to till the field, where another shall sow the seed that shall grow up into a greater civilisation and mark a step forward in the history of humanity. That is our great opportunity, that the possibility that I see opening before us in this policy now changed for the second time. It may be that we have learned enough in the last eighteen years to tread this path rightly, to tread it sufficiently to prepare a field for a greater one to come; and that is the hope in which I live at the present time. I believe that it is possible, if only we can rise to the height of our great opportunity, that someone will come from the far-off land where greater than we are living, and take this instrument and make it fit to be a tool in a Master's hand--some Disciple greater and mightier than I, someone belonging to the same company, but far wiser and far stronger than I. And that such a one will take this Movement and make it a little more what the heart of the Masters desires--more truly a Brotherhood, more full of knowledge, more really linked to the higher worlds by a centre of wise Occultism--that seems to me the great possibility which is opening before us. But, as I said, I know not if we are great enough to take it, or are still too small; but it is to that great work that I would invite your co-operation; it is to that mighty task that I would ask you to address yourselves. At least believe in the possibility of it; at least raise your eyes to that great stature to which it may be our Society shall attain. For if we can rise to it, then it means that we shall be builders of the next civilisation, that our hands shall take part in the making of the foundation of the humanity that is still to be born; it means that we shall be its forerunners, its heralds, that we shall be the messengers whose feet shall be fair upon the mountains, telling of the coming of a greater man, of the birth of a more spiritual humanity. And even supposing that, accepting that ideal, we fail, supposing that we are not strong enough, and wise enough, and unselfish enough, to do it, then, then--if I may quote the words of Giordano Bruno--"It is better to see the Great and fail in trying to achieve it, than never to see it, nor try to achieve it at all."

The Relation of the Masters to the Theosophical Society

Those of you who have been present in the Queen's Hall on Sunday evenings will remember that I spoke there a fortnight ago on "The Relation of Masters to Religions." There, of course, I dealt with the subject in the most general possible way, while here I propose to deal with it more closely; but I must ask all of you, as I asked you last Thursday and the preceding Thursday, to remember that in dealing with the Theosophical Society we are only dealing with one part of a world-wide and, as I might say, century or millennium-wide story--the story, practically, of the relation of the spiritual world to the physical. Although I am now going to deal specially with the relation of the Masters to our own Society, I would ask you all to bear in mind the more general relation of which I have spoken elsewhere. I do not want to repeat what there I said, but I want to recall to your minds the leading principle that the Theosophical Society cannot claim an exclusive right to any special spiritual privilege, that the spiritual privileges that it enjoys are part of the general spiritual heritage of the world, and that you have to consider any special case in relation to those general principles. So that in thinking of the Masters in relation to our own Society, we must bear in mind how very wide are their relations to all great spiritual movements, to all religions, and that all who are spoken of in the different faiths as Founder or Founders of a particular religion would fall under the name, Master.

Now I was hesitating a moment in completing that sentence, because one almost has to explain that in thus using the word one is including in it a little more than is included under the term in the special significance with which we are going to use it now; for in the case of the religions of the Hindus, the religion of the Buddhists, and the religion of the Christians, when we speak of the Founder of each of these religions, we are speaking of great personages who, in the Occult Hierarchy, are higher than those whom we call Masters: in the case of Hinduism, the Manu, who is the Lord really of the whole of the Fifth Root Race; in the case of Buddhism, the Buddha, who is a teacher of all gods and men before He takes up His place as the illuminated, the supreme Buddha. And in the case of the Christian Religion also, there is something peculiar in the life of the Founder. You have there, in the first place, a being whom we call by the name Jesus, in himself a disciple, but living in the world at that time under exceedingly strange and peculiar conditions. Some of you may have read with some amount of care that section of the third volume of _The Secret Doctrine_ which is called "The Mystery of the Buddha." I am bound to confess that as it stands there it is very confused, partly intentionally, I think, on the part of the writer, but also partly in consequence of the fact mentioned in that volume, that you have there put together a large number of fragments, and they were put together by myself at a time when I knew very much less of the arrangement, so to speak, of those relationships between the higher and lower worlds than I do now. Hence there is some darkness there that belongs to the subject, and some that belongs to the incompetence of the compiler. The result of the two together is a good deal of confusion to any student who has not the key to it. I am only concerned for the moment with one of these statements, with what are called "the remains of the Buddha"--not a very comfortable name, because it gives one the idea of a corpse--that is, empty bodies of the Buddha on the various planes. Those have been preserved on the higher planes for special purposes, and are occasionally used under very peculiar conditions, when subtle bodies of a very pure and very lofty character are needed for some particular purpose. Now in the case of Him who was known as Jesus, the subtle bodies were these particular bodies that are kept on the higher planes, and He was allowed to use these for a number of years, holding them, as it were, as tenant for the great personage who was to take possession of them later. Then came the lofty being known as the Bodhisattva, who took possession of these vehicles which had thus been kept ready for Him, and He who was the disciple and now is the Master Jesus took birth later as Apollonius of Tyana, and so passed onwards step by step until he became one of the Masters of the Wisdom.

I made that slight digression because otherwise I should have conveyed a slightly false impression by the phrase "all Founders of religions." We mean amongst ourselves by the word "Master," when used accurately, a very distinctly marked rank in the Occult Hierarchy; He is a being who has attained what is called "liberation" in the East, what is called "salvation" in the West; a being whose soul and Spirit have become unified, who lives consciously on the highest plane of our own universe--the fivefold universe--and whose centre of consciousness is on the atmic, sometimes called the nirvanic, plane. Living in full consciousness on that plane, He has no sense of bondage in any form with which He may ally Himself. He has passed during His Arhatship beyond all desire for life in form, or life out of form. He has thrown away those fetters; together with the limiting "I-making" faculty, the limit of individuality, that also has gone. His consciousness, then, working on this atmic plane, works indifferently up and down through all the five planes, and the whole of these together form to Him but a single plane, the plane of His waking consciousness. That is an important point to remember, for there is often a certain confusion of thought with regard to this term "waking consciousness." It ought not to mean simply the consciousness that you and I may have as waking consciousness, confined to the physical world; but the consciousness which--enlarging stage by stage as the active centre of consciousness rises through the planes inwards--is aware of all which is below that centre; and is aware thereof without it being necessary for the person to leave the physical body, in order that that consciousness may be in an active and working condition. The waking consciousness is the normal, daily consciousness, and may include the physical plane; or physical and astral; or physical, astral, mental; one more when you take in the buddhic; one more when you take in the atmic; and provided that the person whose consciousness is spoken of does not need to leave his active body, his body of action, in using his consciousness on any of these planes, does not have to throw the body into trance in order to be conscious on any or on all of them, we speak always, then, of that consciousness as being "his waking consciousness." Some disciples, for instance, will often include in the waking consciousness the astral, mental, and even buddhic planes; but it is characteristic of the Master alone that He unites in His waking consciousness the whole of the five planes on which our universe is gradually unfolding. So that we may define the position of the Master, for the moment, as that of a Person who has reached liberation; the meaning of that being that he is living in the Spirit consciously; that he is in conscious relation to the Monad, above the atmic plane; his centre of consciousness is there, and as the result of the centre of consciousness being in the Monad, the whole of the five planes become part of his waking consciousness. As regards the bodies there is also a difference: the whole of the five bodies of these planes act for Him as a single body, His body of action. That does not mean, of course, that He cannot separate off the parts if He needs to do so; but it means that in His ordinary, normal condition, the whole of His bodies are only layers of a single body, just as much as solid, liquid, gases, and ethers, for you and me, form our physical body, and we need not trouble to distinguish the matter belonging to one sub-plane or another. So to the Master, the matter of the whole of these planes forms His body of action, and although He is able to separate one part from another if he desires, normally He will be working with the whole of them together, and the whole will constitute the instrument of His physical or waking consciousness.

It is hardly necessary to add to that definition that He is one who is always in possession of a physical body; it is implied in the very description I have been giving. That part of it is important only, or chiefly, when you are considering the question of liberation in relation to a number of different classes, as we may say, in this great Occult Hierarchy, the names in the West are not familiar, and there is no particular need to trouble you with them for the moment in the Samskrit form. Speaking generally, you have a class I have just alluded to, the Masters who possess the physical body, and another who are without that body, and are therefore not called Jivanmuktas (the name you so often find in our books in relation to the Masters) but Muktas, with a prefix which means "without a body." Then again you may have other classes, Beings who perform various functions in the universe; some, for instance, animate the whole of the physical universe, and are distinguished as being what is called blended with matter, the class that gives the sense of life, of consciousness, to all those things in Nature which so much impress the mind occasionally when we are face to face in solitude with some splendid landscape--some great forest, perhaps, in the silence. We need not go into these various classes; I only mention them in order to separate from the rest that particular class of freed, liberated, or, if you like the Christian term, "saved," persons, who no more need come involuntarily into incarnation, but who are free both as regards consciousness and as regards matter.

Now these great Beings that I have just defined ought to be separated in your thought for a very practical reason that we shall see in a moment; they ought to be separated in your thought from those still mightier Beings in the grades of the Occult Hierarchy that stretch further and further upwards into the invisible worlds. For you lose a great deal practically when you mass the whole of them together, and fail to recognise the particular function of a Master, as regards the world in which He voluntarily takes incarnation. It is the kind of distinction that we have sometimes put to students as regards the use of the words Jesus and Christ; Jesus denotes specifically the man, the living man, the Master, who is still in possession of a physical body, and in close relation to the physical earth; the Christ, in a higher sense, is an indwelling spiritual being, who can be reached by the Spirit, but not seen as such by the eyes in any phenomenal world. So again there is the yet loftier Being to whom the name of Christ is applied amongst the Christians, when they are speaking of One we call the Second LOGOS; these are Beings of different grades, and in different relations to mankind; but the Master, as Master, is a man, and the manhood must never be forgotten. It was on that point that H.P.B. laid so much stress in speaking of those Beings with whom she had come into physical contact, whom she knew in their physical bodies; and one thing, as you know, which she protested against in relation to this type of Being was the putting Them too far away from human love and sympathy, making Them belong to a class of beings to whom at present They do not belong, and hence making a gulf between Them and humanity which ought not to be made, because the making of it destroys Their value to the people who make it. A phrase she once used, that I have quoted to you before, is the complaint that "they have turned our Masters into cold far-off stars, instead of living men," and on the fact that They are living men she continually insisted; for it is by virtue of that living manhood that They are able to play the part that They play in the evolution of the race. Others have other work to do as regards humanity, as regards the destinies of the nations, and so on, but these particular people are still in close touch with the humanity to which They belong, and They deliberately refuse to go on away from it, remaining with it until humanity, at least with regard to very, very large numbers of its members, has reached the position in which They stand to-day, as the promise of what humanity shall be, the first-fruits of humanity as it is. They are specially concerned with the direct teaching, training, and helping of man, in the quickening of his evolution; and the reason the body is retained is in order that this close personal touch may be kept, primarily with Their disciples, and then through Their disciples with comparatively large numbers of people. And it is a marked and significant fact, that just in proportion as a religion has lost touch with this aspect of the Divine Life which we call the Life of the Master, so has it tended to become more formal, less highly vitalised, less spiritual, with less of the mystic element in it, and more of the literal; so that it becomes necessary in the efflux of time that every now and again a Master should come forth from the Great White Lodge, and testify again upon earth to the reality of the tie between the Elder Brothers of the race and the younger brothers who are living constantly in the physical world.

Now one distinguishing mark of a Master, His chief function, we may say, is to perform the greatest act of sacrifice which is known in the Occult Hierarchy, save the act of the One who is called The Great Sacrifice, the Silent Watcher, whose sacrificial act is still greater than the sacrificial acts performed by Those who are spoken of as Masters. This particular act of sacrifice, occurring from time to time at the beginning of a new epoch in religion and civilisation, is performed by one of the Body, who volunteers to start a further spiritual impulse in the world, and to bear the karma of the impulse that He generates. That may not appear to you at first glance, unless you have gone into the subject carefully, to be such a transcendent act of sacrifice as it really is. It may seem a comparatively small thing to start such an impulse, and very vague probably are the ideas of many of you as to what is implied in the statement "bearing the karma," which the generation of the impulse implies. The great act of sacrifice lies not only in the truth that He is wearing a physical body of coarse matter, which hampers Him from time to time, but that He cannot lay that body aside, once He has used it for giving this great spiritual impulse, until that impulse is entirely exhausted, and the religion, or the association, to which it has given birth has vanished out of the physical world. Take, for instance, the case of the Master, Jesus: He--by His own voluntary act of course, in the beginning, for it is always a volunteer who comes forward; such a sacrifice cannot be imposed--He, voluntarily, giving up His body, and later taking from the Bodhisattva the guarding of the infant plant of which the Bodhisattva had sown the seed which was to grow into the great tree of Christianity, taking that from Him, He bound Himself by the acceptance of that work to remain in the bonds of the physical body until the Christian Church had completed its work, and until the last Christian had passed away, either into liberation, or re-birth into some other faith. It is the same with the other great religions, so many of which are now dead--the religion of Egypt, of Chaldea, and many another. The Masters who had to do with those have long since cast away Their physical bodies, and thereby ceased to be what we call Masters, because the religion that each gave to the world had done its work, and no souls remained who could be further helped by passing through the teaching and the training of that particular religion. This is the central idea of the act of sacrifice, and it becomes the more a sacrificial act because the One who undertakes this tremendous task cannot tell how the impulse will flow in all its details, cannot even estimate the amount of difficulty, of delay, nay, of mischief, that may grow out of the impulse that He has given. In the first place, He Himself is limited by these bodies that He has assumed. He cannot use the whole of His vast consciousness within the limitations of a physical brain and a physical body. Thus, although He has unified His bodies and is able, so to speak, to run up and down the ladder of the planes as He will, He is still largely limited in His activities where He is working in the unplastic matter of the physical plane; and so, when He undertakes a work like this, He generates causes whose effects He cannot thoroughly calculate, He takes the risk which surrounds every great undertaking, He submits Himself to the conditions of this task upon which He enters, and He is obliged, having once taken it, to bear it until success or failure has crowned the effort that He makes.

Those of you who have carefully thought on these subjects will realise that while the knowledge of a Master is, as regards you or me, practical omniscience, it is by no means omniscience on His own plane, relative to the problems with which He has to deal and which He has to solve. A Master amongst Masters, a Master within the Great White Lodge, He is amongst His peers, in the presence of His Superiors, and the problems with which that Lodge has to deal, the questions on which that Lodge has to decide, are, if I may use the phrase, as difficult and as puzzling on that plane of being as the problems that we have to decide down here are on our plane. Hence the possibility of miscalculation, the possibility of error, the possibility of mistake; and you can well understand that these beings are subject to such limitations when you remember the startling assertion that even the Lord Buddha Himself, high above the Masters, that even He committed an error in His work on the physical plane. When, then, a Master volunteers to serve as what may literally be called the scapegoat of a new spiritual movement, He takes up a karma whose whole course He is unable to see. And it need not, therefore, be a matter of surprise that when the time was approaching when another great spiritual impulse might again be given, according to cyclic law, when the two who volunteered to undertake the task, to make the sacrifice, offered Themselves in the Great White Lodge, differences of opinion arose as to whether it was desirable or not that what we now call the Theosophical Society should be founded.