Now I have mentioned those mighty ones of the past because without that it might seem only a dream when I speak of such possibilities in modern times as well. I have traced the four latest appearances of Him who is the “Wisdom-Truth,” the last of the four manifestations before, appearing to take His last Initiation as the Buddha, He passed away and became the Son united with the Father, no longer Teacher, no longer Guide of our humanity. But there is never a break in the great succession; in that mighty succession of religious Teachers the chair of the Teacher never remains unfilled; there is ever a wise one to fill it, the wisest who is living upon earth; and when one lays down the sceptre of the Teacher, which is the symbol of His rule, another is waiting by the steps of the Chair of Wisdom to take that seat of Supreme Teacher as His predecessor passes away from earth. For never is the world left without its Teacher; never is mankind left orphaned, without the mighty One to guard and save; as one passes away, His function over, another steps in to fill the seat and carry on the teaching of mankind.
When Gautama was initiated as the Buddha, another then became what I have called the “Wisdom-Truth,” the Bodhisattva. His first manifestation upon earth was at the beginning of the next sub-race. That you will very readily see, and for that reason I have been tracing down those names, sub-race after sub-race, that you might realise the relation between the new departure of mankind and the manifestation of the Supreme Teacher. So when the fifth sub-race was being born, when there was the slow growth of the Teuton in the forests of Germany, when the germs, the seeds of that new sub-race were being sown over Northern Europe, then was made manifest again the Supreme Teacher, and He came to the world once more to found a new religion, once more to bless a dawning civilisation. The religion that He founded, the civilisation that He blessed, gave to him the Greek name, the Christ. Let us pause for a moment on that western name—name, again, of an office. For it was not the name of the Buddha that He wore; it was not the name of an individual. As we look at the dominant Greek thought of the time we find that that thought embodied its highest triumph in a certain institution known as the Mysteries. There were Mysteries in ancient Egypt, in ancient Persia, in ancient India, in all the countries of that elder past; and among the Greeks also there were Mysteries—the Orphic Mysteries, to which I alluded, and many others known to the students of Grecian history under many names of Grecian Gods and Goddesses, as we call them, of the Teachers of the past. In those Mysteries there was a certain grade marked with the name Christos; these Mysteries the reflexion on our earth and in our poor worldly mirror of the great Initiations that belong to the Occult Hierarchy that guides the religious destinies of men, a shadow of those supreme Initiations thrown down upon the mirror of earth for the helping of ordinary humanity. This kind of reflexion is indicated, for instance, in the Christian Testament when it is said that Moses, the great leader of the Jews, made all things according to the pattern shown to him in the mount—a well-known ancient phrase, the Mount of Initiation—an indication to the people who followed him as lawgiver that the temple which he outlined, which for a time was seen in the tabernacle that accompanied the Jews in the wilderness, and then received its more gorgeous presentment in the Temple of King Solomon, was formed after the pattern of the heavenly things. So the heavenly and the earthly are thus related as object and image, and the object, which is the great Initiations of the Hierarchy, was imaged here in the civilisations of the past in the Mysteries, by which, by many ordeals and in many difficult ways of training and of discipline, the best men and women of the older civilisations were guided upwards from the human to the superhuman path. In those Mysteries there was this grade, the Christos, the anointed one. It was the grade of the Initiate who had triumphed over suffering, the grade of the Initiate who had carried the cross, the grade of the Initiate who was to know no more compulsory death or compulsory birth, that which marked him as having crossed the threshold of the superhuman, and being ready to enter on that higher grade of manifested life. Natural, inevitable, that in a time when Greek thought was marking the highest point of human attainment and dominating Europe, the Greek name should be taken to describe the mighty One revealed as Teacher upon earth. What nobler name could be chosen, what title more significant, what symbol more instructive, than to call the teacher who appeared and was slain by the name of the Christ?
In the early days of Christianity, as most of you probably know, a difference, which is being revived in our own day, was drawn between Jesus the Hebrew and Christ the anointed Teacher. Look back to all those schools of philosophic and learned teachers in the early days of Christianity, who, when ignorance triumphed after the fall of Rome and Constantinople, were branded with the name of heretics—those who were called the Gnostics, the knowers. A significant name. If you turn over the pages of Origen, one of the greatest teachers, remember, in the early Church, you will find many passages in his exposition of Christianity in which he says that it is necessary for the Christian Church to have in it many Gnostics, who should serve as the foundation on which it should be built, as the pillars on which it should be reared. He used the word in the sense of knowers, not alluding to the many schools classed together under that name. In a famous passage Origen points out that, while it is true that Christianity is for the unlearned, while he says it is medicine for the sinner, it is not out of the sinners and the unlearned that the great Christian Church could be builded; and he goes on to say that, while that is true, and there is medicine for the sinner, the Church must be buttressed by the Gnostic, not by the sinner, by those who know, not by those who are ignorant. That was well provided for in those early centuries of Christendom, for they also had their Mysteries, just as had the older religions around them. Turn over the pages of those early Christian bishops and doctors of the Church, the pages of S. Clement of Alexandria—canonised as saint for his learning and his holiness—turn over almost any of the pages you will of those earlier Christian teachers, who learned from the lips of those who had received their teaching again from the lips of the followers of the Christ Himself, and you will find continual references to the Mysteries of Jesus. You will find the rules laid down by which alone admission to those Mysteries could be won; you will read in the pages of S. Clement the proclamation of the hierophant to whom the candidates presented themselves, he who had in his hands the key of that kingdom of heaven, and you will find that as they stood before him he told them that only those who for a long time had been conscious of no transgression might come and learn the teaching which Jesus gave secretly to His disciples. Those were the old words of challenge ere the door of that kingdom of heaven was flung open, and only to such men and women was admission to the Mysteries possible. There they learned the inner secret teachings, those that are indicated in the Gospel story; for you remember how it was written of the Christ: “For without a parable spake He not unto them”; you remember how, when the disciples asked for explanation, His answer was: “To you it is given to know the mysteries of the Kingdom of God, but to others in parables.” You may remember, again, how it was said that when His disciples were with Him in the house, then He told them things which to the multitude without He refused to reveal; and you may remember the further promise that He left, when He knew that His own earthly life was drawing to a close: “I have many things to say to you, but ye cannot bear them now.” The Christian tradition of the Mysteries declared that those many things were told afterwards, when the disciples were more ready to receive, when the pupils were fitter to be taught. Origen tells us that all those teachings were kept in the Christian Mysteries, and made the secret teachings of the Church, given only to those who were worthy.
In those days when many knew, when many understood, a distinction was drawn between Jesus and Christ. I alluded to it, you remember, in the first of this course of lectures; and I did so deliberately, intending to return to it when, having dealt with the many intermediate questions, I should arrive at the lecture on the Coming Christ. For there was a difference between the human body of the mighty disciple Jesus, born in Bethlehem, and the divine Power that came down upon that body at the point of time marked as the Baptism, when it is written, the Spirit of God came down upon Him and abode with Him; there you have marked the Coming of the Christ, the consecration of the Supreme Teacher. That distinction you find recognised in the Epistles, though no attention is drawn to it further in the Gospels after that startling and suggestive statement; but if you take the Pauline epistles you find yourself in quite a different atmosphere from that of the history as told in the Gospels; you find there the name of Christ in a new meaning, a mystical meaning of profoundest import; you find S. Paul declaring that he does not ask to know Him after the flesh, it is the inner Christ he seeks; you find him saying of that mystic Christ that He has to be born in the believer—a statement that could never have been made of the physical body of Jesus. You find him declaring that that mystic birth of the Christ in human souls is to be followed by a growth of the mystic Christ within the believer, until at last he has reached the measure of the stature of the fulness of the Christ. That is the mystic Christian life, the Christ born in the soul, unfolding His divine powers as the Christian grows in wisdom and in love, showing Himself more and more manifest as the human life unfolds to the divine, until the perfect Christ is manifest and the Son of God is seen again on earth. But that old mystical idea slipped out of the Church teachings, and only remained in the Testament, marked but not understood. And so He who was the inspiring Spirit, the Supreme Teacher, the all-pervading life of His Church, became the outside Saviour, who by a physical sacrifice was said to have made atonement between God and man; and you had a vicarious atonement, a legal substitution, instead of that identity of nature which made the Christ and the believer one. That is the change which came over Christian teaching in those long ages of darkness that followed the vanishing of the Mysteries that had kept the flame of knowledge alive, until there were no longer pupils willing to be taught, and by the absence of the pupils the teachings of the Masters were withdrawn.
So we realise that with the revival in our own days of the mystic teaching and the realisation that there is a life in Christianity which is rightly marked out by that holiest of names, we begin to see in that spreading new life in Christian churches, in the revival of that idea of the possibility of the divine growth in humanity, we see one of the signs of the coming of the Christ, preparatory to His next manifestation upon earth. For it would scarcely have been worth while merely to amuse you for an hour with the story of the past if it did not bear on the present and the future, on the repetition of the old-world tale, of the remanifestation of that mighty Son of God. For that reason, to make, as it were, the gulf less wide between the ordinary thought and the thought of the Occultist, I spoke about the earlier manifestations, marking each successive sub-race of man; and if you have followed along the line of what I have been putting to you Sunday after Sunday of the stage at which the world is standing now, of the transition age in which we are, of the closing age that is passing, of the opening age that is coming, of all the signs which show the ending of the one, of all the signs which show the beginning of the other, then without shock or jar should come to you the present idea that we may well be looking again for a manifestation of the Teacher, the Supreme Teacher of the worlds, who was last manifest as the Christ in Palestine. Let us see what that would mean.
Unless all that I have been telling you during the past five weeks is a mere dream; unless the very facts that I have pointed you to are utterly without significance, you ought almost to have thought yourselves into the point to which I fain would lead you now—that we are on the threshold of a new manifestation, and that the mighty Teacher again will appear as man among men. Now, to say that to any people may only make them think: “But why for us?” So might the Jew have questioned when last He came on earth. That a thing so great, so transcendent, and so rare, should come to earth at any particular time, to be measured by only a few years of mortal time—that that should be now seems too strange, too beautiful, to be true. And yet He came before; why not again? If at the birth of the fifth sub-race, why not at the birth of the sixth? Some must be on earth when any such manifestation takes place; some generation of men and women must be born around the coming of a Christ; and there is no valid reason that any one of you can give why this age should not be such a time, and the people of this age the recipients of the new flood of spiritual life. Strange, because it happens seldom, but sure, because it happened at similar crises in the story of the world; and the strangeness of it does not mark it as untrue when you see the signs of the coming all around you, if your eyes should be open to recognise what they mean. For an expectation is spreading everywhere of the coming of some mighty Teacher, and here and there on earth the expectation has taken voice, nay, has even had a human messenger and herald to proclaim it. In Persia such a messenger came in the one who was called the Bāb, who declared the coming of a mighty one, followed by another said to be yet greater than himself, and yet a third, the Abbas Effendi of the present time, certainly a great spiritual teacher, but one who still declares that the mightiest is yet to come, who is to bind together the eastern and the western worlds.
Not only along that line has this expectation shown itself, but among the people of Islām in a strange combative form, natural to their fighting races, showing itself, therefore, as leader in battle to be ruler in the future; and through Africa you see it in this expectation of the Mahdi, which has given so much trouble during our own time.
I only mention these to show you that the thought is spreading and the expectation growing; for ever the world grows expectant before the mighty One returns to reveal Himself on earth. Such a coming of the Christ the occult world is looking for—for the same great Being who appeared in Palestine, for He is still the Supreme Teacher, the same individual. Who may say what name He will bear? But what is of import to all of us is: Shall we recognise Him when He comes, or shall we be as blind of vision, as hard of heart, as were the Jews among whom His last manifestation occurred? It is so easy for us looking back through the glamour of the centuries in which the great Christian Master has been the head of Christendom, and seen as perfect man with the irradiation also of the Christ upon Him—for the Church has made no distinction between the two all these later years—it is so easy for us to look back through all those centuries and say we should have known Him had we been there. But that has happened so often. Was it not His reproach to the people of His day: “Your fathers slew the prophets, and ye build their sepulchres”? There are always plenty of people ready to rear the sepulchre of honour to the name of the prophet of the past; how few in any age of the world have recognised the prophet of their own day! That is not only true of the Supreme Teacher, but of others a little beyond the knowledge and the power of their own day; ever they have been met with hatred, ever the world has cast them out, has tortured or has slain them. Why should we in our own day, then, be any wiser? Why should the fifth sub-race, the most combative of all the nations, the most critical, the most sceptical, the most unwilling to recognise the higher, the most self-assertive—why should we have eyes open to see a greatness that has never been recognised in the past? That is the problem that may well exercise our minds, in order that we may try to develop in ourselves the power to recognise should He come in our own day. For one great rule runs all through nature: that you can only recognise that to which you can respond. It is true of the outer nature and our physical eyes. We can only see each other because in the retina of the eye there is the ether that answers to the external waves of light. Similarly in moral characteristics, and, above all, in the spiritual nature, we can only recognise in proportion as we reproduce. If in ourselves there is some opening up of the spiritual nature, if in ourselves there are some of the qualities which shine out so gloriously in Him, if in us there is some touch of that nature which in Him has risen to divinity, ah! then it is possible that we may throb responsive to Him when He comes, hidden, as He ever has been, beneath the veil of flesh. But that that may be so we must go outside the thought of our time to that of the time that is coming; not the combativeness of the fifth, but the compassion of the sixth sub-race must find its home in our hearts. And if one may judge from the past, when He comes He may again be despised and rejected of men, for the spiritual ideal is not an ideal to which the heart of our own age quickly responds. You can see it in the characteristics of the Christ: “when He was reviled He reviled not again; when He suffered He threatened not.” But amongst you that would show great poverty of spirit. Not to revile back when you are reviled, in the mind of the modern day, is to mark the reviling as true. That is the spirit of the time. If you are slandered, libelled, abused, go into court and drag the slanderer there; if not, you are guilty. That is the common opinion of the time. One who has learned the lesson of the Christ, who before His accusers answered nothing, that man is condemned by the popular mind of the day. He would answer if he could, because they would answer if they could; but the measure of the Christ is not the measure of those who bear His name in the combative civilisation of the time. And so when He comes again, reviled and slandered as He must be if He be far beyond our knowledge and our understanding, the common verdict will go against Him as it went against Him before. We may not murder; that is too merciful in these modern days. We prefer rather that the victim shall live to be tortured than to give him the mercy of a swift, a ready death.
And so, looking over the world at the moment, there seems little likelihood that when He comes He will be welcome. A few will recognise Him as they ever have done, and maybe, as the characteristics of the coming race are those of spirituality, there will be more to welcome Him, for the spiritual life is spreading to-day, and those who are of the Spirit will know the law of the Spirit; and I would fain leave you with the thought to-night that that is a truth, that the Supreme Teacher will again ere very long be incarnate upon earth, again made manifest as Teacher, again walking and living amongst us as last He walked in Palestine. Splendid as is the hope, mighty as is the inspiration, there is nothing too glorious to be possible for the ever-unfolding Spirit in man, and the hope of to-day is that that spirit is spreading, despite the characteristics of our time; that men are becoming more liberal, more tolerant, more ready to recognise that which is true and just. And it may well be that we have reached such a time of evolution that the popular mind of the day will be transcended by large numbers of the more spiritually minded, and that when He comes again He will be able to stay amongst us more than the three brief years that marked His last ministry. That, then, is the word, the thought I leave with you: to develop in yourselves the Spirit of the Christ, and then at His coming you shall recognise His beauty. Learn compassion, learn tenderness, learn good thoughts of others rather than evil, learn to be tender with the weak, learn to be reverent to the great; and if you can develop those qualities in you, then the coming Christ may be able to number you among His disciples, and the welcome that the earth shall give Him shall not again be a cross.