Everyone of us who belongs to any special religion can trace back along the line of his religion further and further into the past, until he comes to its beginning, its first Teacher. And round that Teacher is usually a group of men and women who to the Founder of the religion are disciples, but to those who accept the religion later are teachers, apostles. And this is invariably true. The Hebrew, if you ask him, will trace back his religion to the time of the great legislator Moses, and behind Him to a yet more heroic figure, Abraham, the "friend of God." Look back to some yet older faith, the faith of Egypt, of Chaldea, of Persia, of China, of India, and you will find exactly the same thing is true. The ParsÎ, representative of a splendid tradition, but whose religion, as it now, is, as has been well said, "a religion of fragments" only—he will trace back his religion to his own great Prophet, the Prophet of the Fire, who led the exodus from the centre of Asia and guided His people into what we now call the land of Persia. Egypt, if you ask her story, will show you heroic figures of her past, and amongst them that great King and Priest, Osiris, who, slain, as the old legend tells us, rises again, as Lord and Judge of His people. Buḍḍhism, spread in the far East, will trace back its story to the Buḍḍha, and will declare in addition to that, that not only is the Buḍḍha the Teacher of that particular faith, but that a living person still exists on the earth as Teacher, as Protector, whom they call the Boḍhisaṭṭva, the wise and the pure. India will tell you of a great group of teachers gathered round their Manu, the tradition of whose laws is still preserved, and is still used as the basis of the social legislation administered now by the English rulers. And round that great Lawgiver of the past, wise men are gathered whose names are known throughout the land, each of them standing at the head of some noble Indian family, that traces its ancestry backward and backward till it ends in the Sage, the Teacher. And this is equally true of more modern religions. Take the Christian religion, and the Christian traces his religion back until it finds its source in the personality of the Prophet of Judea, of Jesus the Christ. And it is interesting, as one of those strange parallels which meet us often in the comparative study of religions, that just as the Buḍḍhist has his Buḍḍha and also his Boḍhisaṭṭva, so the Christian has the two names: Christ, representing the living Spirit, a stage in the spiritual unfolding, the name representing a stage, an office, rather than a special man, and joined to that the individual name of Jesus, in order to mark the intimate connection, as some would say the identity, between the two. But just as among the Buḍḍhists the distinction is drawn, so among the early Christians you will find a similar distinction was made between the man Jesus and the spiritual Christ. So that in those early days many of those who were called "Gnostics" divided the two in a similar fashion, although uniting them at a certain stage of the teaching, of the ministry. And if you take the latest born of the religions, the MussulmÂn, the religion of IslÂm, that again is traced backward to a Prophet, the Prophet Muhammad, the great Prophet of Arabia. Universally this is true, that the religion traces itself back to a single mighty figure, whom some call a "God-man," a man too divine to be regarded as wholly like those amongst whom he lived and moved and taught; above them and yet of them, closely bound to them by a common humanity, although raised above them by a manifestation of the God within, mightier, more complete, more compelling, than the manifestation in the ordinary men and women around Him. So with all religions, and in that thought of the divine figure, the Founder of every faith, you have the fullest, the truest, the most perfect conception of that which we Theosophists call the ideal of the Master. All such mighty beings by the Theosophist would be given the name of Master. And not by the Theosophist alone, for that word in other religions has been applied to the Founder, the Chief of the faith. Nay, to the Christian it should come with special force, with special significance, for it was the name that Christ the Teacher chose as best expressing His own relationship to those who believed on Him, to those who followed Him. "Neither be ye called masters," He said; "for one is your Master, even Christ." And so again you may remember that, in speaking to His disciples, He said: "Ye call Me Master and Lord, and ye say well, for so I am." So that to the Christian heart the name Master should be above all other names sacred and beloved, since it was the chosen name of their own Teacher, the name that He claimed from His disciples, that name that He used as representing His relation to them. So this idea of a Master in religion certainly should be one which comes with no alien sound, no foreign significance, among those who look up to the Master Christ. And exactly the same idea is that of a Master in any great religion; it is a common idea—it signifies the Founder, the Teacher, divine and yet human. To that point I will return later.

Let us study the central idea of these Masters a little more closely, and see what are the special characteristics which mark Them in the religions of the past. If you go back very, very far, you will always find that the Master wears a double character: ruler, law-giver, on the one side; teacher upon the other. In all the old civilisations this is characteristic; for in those days the idea had not arisen of sacred and secular, or sacred and profane, as we say in the modern world. To the old civilisations there was no such thing as sacred history and profane history; no division was made between sacred science and secular science; all history was sacred, all science was divine. And so much was that the case that, when you find an ancient pupil asking of an ancient teacher as to divine science, the answer was given: "There are two forms of divine science, the higher and the lower." And the lower divine science was made up of all the things that now you call literature, science, and art; all those were run over by name, and summed up under the heading of the lower divine science. The higher, supreme Science was that knowledge of God, to which accurately the word Wisdom ought only to be applied. So that to their thought Deity was everywhere, and there was only variety in the manifestations of Deity. All Nature was sacred. God expressed Himself in every object, in every form. All that could be said was that through one form more of His glory came than through another. The form might be more or less transparent, but the inner radiant light was the same in all. And it was natural, inevitable, with such a conception of Nature and of God, that the Master, the Founder, of a religion should unite in His sole person the office alike of the Priest and of the King. And so you find it. The only likeness in modern days is not now a very fortunate one in the eyes of many—the King-Pontiff of the Roman Catholic Church. For so ill had the duties of the King been performed in that high seat, that the people lost the sense of the divinity, and revolted against it, and cast it off, and left that Pontiff shorn of his royal character. But far back in the old civilisations, in the one person the two offices were united. The Pharaoh of Egypt was truly the Lord of the triple diadem, but also the supreme Priest in every temple of his land. So also in Chaldea, in India, and in many another land; and wherever that is the case you find a certain outline given to the civilisation, differing in detail, but marvellously similar in the broad touches of that sketch. You find that in those days the Priest-King, the Ruler of the land and the supreme Teacher of his people, shaped the polity of the nation as he shaped the doctrines taught in the temples of the religion. Both the religion and the polity have the keynote of duty. And always with increasing power there came greater weight of responsibility, heavier burden of duty; and the freest in those civilisations were the poorest. Those who were regarded as the children of the national household were ever cared for with extremest care. The very fact that they were the lowest in development gave them the greatest claim on the divine Man who ruled, so that all through the note of those civilisations is the note which to-day would be called socialistic—with one enormous difference, that the most wise ruled. The result, in a sense, would be the result that the Socialist dreams of, the absence of poverty, the universality of some form of work done for the State as a whole, a duty of each man to bear a share of the burden; but the burden grew lighter and lighter as it came downwards to the younger members of the family, of the nation; the duty the most burdensome was placed on the highest. And you will find that, while still the tradition remained, it was very difficult sometimes to get rulers and governors of large States and small. It comes out in the Chinese books. The Emperor sends down word that So-and-so is to be governor of a State, and So-and-so, in those degenerate days, generally tried to escape from it, because of the tremendous burden that the governorship imposed. For in the case of the old Rulers, in the days when the divine Kings were the Kings and Priests of the people, anything that was wrong in the nation was related to the Ruler, and not to the people at large. Remember the words of one great Teacher of later days, Confucius, when a King turned to him and said: "Master, why is there robbery, why is there murder in my land? How shall I stop it?" His stern answer was: "If you, O King, did not steal and murder, there would be no robbery and no murder in your land." Always the highest with the weight of responsibility; the younger with the right to enjoy, to be happy, to be cared for. Where food was short, they were the last to starve, and the King the first; where anything went short of material things, they were the first to be given their share, and the King the last. Such was the outline of the social organisation. Slight traces of it remain even to the present day. You can see traces of it in the civilisation that was destroyed in Peru by the conquerors, the Spanish conquerors, of that land. Some traces of it still remain in India, although degraded and decayed. The note is always the same: the higher, the more burdened; the higher, the harder the life; the higher, the greater the duty. For that is the type of the Master, and the idea ran through the whole of the civilisation. He, the Priest-King, mighty in knowledge and in power, must bear upon his broad shoulders the burden that would crush a weaker man. And so downwards through all the degrees of ruler, in proportion to the power and its expansion, so in proportion the weight and the responsibility.

They passed away from earth as humanity grew out of its infant stage. My phrase is too strong—I should not have said: "They passed away from earth." They passed away into silence, not from earth; thereon many of Them still remain. But They drew back from the outer position, from outer power, and became the great company of Elder Brothers of humanity, only some of whom remained in close touch with the race.

And that is the next point in the idea of the Master. Those who founded a religion were bound to remain wearing the body of man, fixed to the earth, bound to the outward semblance of humanity, so long as the religion lived upon earth which They had given to it. That was the rule: no liberation for the Man who founded a religion until all who belonged to that religion had themselves passed out of it, into liberation, or into another faith, and the religion was dead. The death of a religion is the liberation from all bondage of the Master who gave it to the world. He in a very real sense is incarnate in the religion that He bestows. While that religion lives and teaches, while men still find in it the expression of their thought, so long that divine Man must remain, and guide and protect and help the religion which He gave to earth. Such is the law. No Master may leave our humanity while that which He started as a human school is still existing upon earth. Some have passed away, and would no longer be spoken of as Masters—the name given to Them in the occult world is different—but Those who have passed away have passed away because Their religions are dead: the Masters of ancient Egypt, of ancient Chaldea, have gone from this earth into the mighty company of Those who no longer bear the burden of the flesh. But the Masters of every living religion live on earth, and are the links, for the people of that religion, between God and man; the Master is the divine Man, one with his brothers, who look to him for help, one with the God around and above, and through Him the spiritual life is ever flowing. The word "mediator," applied in the Christian scriptures to the Christ, signifies a real and living relation. There are such mediators between God and man, and they are all God-men, true Christs. Such links between the God without and the God within us are necessary for the helping by the one, and for the manifestation of the other. The God within us, unfolding his powers, answers to the God without us, and the link is the God-man who shares the manifested nature of divinity, and yet remains one with His brethren in the flesh. A bondage, yes. But a voluntary bondage—a bondage assumed in the day in which the Messenger came forth from the great White Lodge to bring a new revelation, to found a new divine kingdom upon earth. Heavy the responsibility of a divine Man who takes upon Himself the tremendous burden of speaking out to the world a new Word in the divine revelation. All that grows out of it makes the heavy burden of His destiny. Everything which happens within that communion of which He is the centre must react upon Him, and He is ultimately responsible; and as that divine Word is always spoken in a community of men and women imperfect, sinning, ignorant, that Word is bound to be distorted and twisted, because of the medium in which it works. That is why every such Teacher is called a "sacrifice"—Himself at once the sacrificer and the sacrifice, the greatest sacrifice that man may make to man, a sacrifice so mighty that none in whom Deity is not unfolded to the greatest height compatible with human limitation is strong enough to make it, is strong enough to endure it. That is the true sacrifice of the Christ; not a few hours' agony in dying, but century after century of crucifixion on the cross of matter, until salvation has been won for the people who bear His name, or until they have passed under some other Lord. Hence is that road always called "the Way of the Cross." Long before Christianity came to birth, the "Way of the Cross" was known to every Initiate, and Those were said to tread it who volunteered for the mighty service of proclaiming the old message again in the ears of the world of the time. A sacrifice: for none may tell, who volunteers for the service, what lies before the religion that He founds, what shall be the deeds of the community that He begins on earth. And every sin and crime of that religion, or that Church, falls into the scales of Karma stamped with the name of the Founder. He is responsible for it, and bearing that responsibility is the mighty sacrifice He makes; and the result is inevitable; for in a world imperfect no perfection can be perfectly mirrored. As the sun-ray falling upon water is twisted and distorted, so is it with the rays of a perfect truth falling in amongst a community of imperfect men; and no action down here can be a perfect action, for "action," it is written in an ancient book, "is surrounded with evil as a fire is surrounded with smoke." The imperfection of the medium makes the smoke round every Word of Fire, every Word of Truth. And the Founder must endure the pungency of the smoke, if He would speak the Word of Fire. The realisation of that, however dimly, however imperfectly, makes the passion of gratitude in the human heart to those Men who bear their infirmities and open up the way to God for man. It is that which in some forms of popular Christianity has been distorted in speaking of the sacrifice of the Christ, when it has been made a sacrifice, not for man, sinful and foolish, but to the Father of all perfection, who needs no sacrifice of suffering in order to reconcile Him to the children sprung from His life. That is one of the distortions of the ignorance of man; that the falsification which has been spoken in the name of religion and has obscured the perfect love of God—for every divine Man who comes out is a manifestation of the divine heart, and a revelation of God to man. And how could it be that the Master of Compassion, who wins human hearts by the tenderness of His love, could be a Revealer of God, if there were not in God a compassion mightier than His own, and profounder than His humanity, as God is greater than man? But the splendor of the truth dazzled the eyes of those to whom it was presented, and their own ignorance, and fear, and limitation, imposed upon that perfect sacrifice the terrible aspect of a sacrifice to God—an aspect which it assumed, not only in Christianity, but in other faiths as well. For the most part, not always, in the elder religions they understood that the story of the life and death was an allegory, a "myth," as they called it, revealing a deeper truth. And so they avoided the pain and the sense of revulsion which has roused the conscience of civilised man to revolt against the cruder presentments of the doctrine; the great truth of the sacrifice is true, but it is not a legal, a contract, sacrifice, made between man's representative and God; but the effort of the divine to make itself understood, and the voluntary binding of the sacrifice to the cross of matter until His people are set free. And then, as I said, He passes on into other worlds, to other work, and is no longer called a Master of the Wisdom.

Now, looking at this idea, let us ask: "What is the work of these Masters in the religions of the world, and why is it that this thought of the Masters has been so revived in the modern world, and made so much more living, in a sense, than it has been for many a long year?" In the early days of Christianity, as I said, you find the idea; but it has largely vanished from the Churches as a living truth, and they think of Jesus, the Christian Master, as risen from the dead and ascended into heaven. And the materialising spirit of ignorance has made the ascent a going away, and the Man has gone, although the God remains. But that is only a materialisation of the older truth; for, according to the truth, heaven is not a faraway place to which people go. No one goes there; they only open their eyes and see it on every side around them. For heaven is a state of the psychic life which is realised in the higher bodies, the bodies of the mental plane, and it does not need to go hither and thither, North, South, East, or West, to find it; for, as the great Teacher said: "Behold, the Kingdom of Heaven is within you"—not far away, beyond the sun or moon or stars. And the ascension of Jesus to heaven, as the Church of England puts it—in words that sound very strange in modern ears, because they have lost their mystic meaning and are only taken in what S. Paul used to call the "carnal" interpretation—in the fourth article of the Church of England, was that He ascended into heaven, taking with Him His "flesh, bones, and all things appertaining to the perfection of man's nature." Now when you take that in the literal and crude signification, naturally the thoughtful man revolts against it. What is this about a physical body and physical bones going up through the air into the sky? And where has it gone to? The modern man cannot believe it in that sense, and so he loses the spiritual verity enshrined in words of symbolism and of allegory. For the fact that Jesus the Master went away, but still dwells on earth in the flesh, that is the truth which the article tries to indicate; and not that He is gone far away into a far-off heaven to sit at the right hand of God, whence He shall come again to judge. He lives in the body, and also lives in the midst of the Church, which is His true mystical body; and so long as that Church exists, so long as that Church is found on earth, so long its Master shall live within it, and shall dwell in a human body. He is not gone away, He has not ascended anywhere in the literal sense, but is permeating the whole of His Communion, and living upon earth until the last Christian has passed away to liberation, or is born into some other faith. That is the inner meaning. He lives and may be reached. And if the teachings of the Theosophical Society have any value for the Christian Church, it is because they are bringing back to live in Christian hearts this living truth of the bodily ever-presence of the Christ amongst them. Theosophists who are Christians, and remain within the limits of the Christian Church, have gained a vivid view of this real humanity of Jesus. They learn that He may be reached as truly now as when He walked near the sea of Galilee, or taught in the streets of Jerusalem, that they may know Him with as real a sense of His presence, may learn from Him as truly as any apostle or disciple in the past, that it is a living and real presence—not only, as the Roman Catholic Church says, in the Sacrament of the altar, but in the experience of the Christian heart. And it has never been left without a witness. Look all through the history of the Christian Church, and see how one after another has come into living touch with the Master Jesus. Every great saint has proclaimed his own experience as regards his contact with his Lord. And only in comparatively modern days, and in parts only of the Christian Church, has that great and vivifying truth been lost sight of. The Greek Church has never lost it; the Roman Catholic Church has never lost it. The testimony of the saints in those ancient communions bears witness to the continuing connection between the Christian and the Christ. You find it in some of the extreme Protestant communities also, where they bear a living testimony to the reality of the personal communion. Not through books and churches only, but within the living heart of man, visible sometimes even to physical eyes, shining out in the vision of the saint, speaking in the rapture of the prophet—it has never quite passed away from Christianity. It is coming back more strongly year after year, coming back with increased vitality, with more reality and strength behind it; coming back because the Christ within the Church, finding that forgetfulness was coming over the modern mind, has, as in the olden days, used a scourge of whipcord instead of only the voice of love. For inasmuch as the voice of love was not listened to, and the reality of His presence was being forgotten, He has used the whip of what is called the Higher Criticism to drive men out of books back to the living Master of the Christian faith. When you build the house of your faith on books and manuscripts, on councils and traditions, you are building on the sand, and the storm has come—the storm of criticism, of investigation, of scholarship, and the house of faith totters, because it is founded on the sand. But build the house of your faith on the rock of human experience, on the one rock on which every true Church is founded, the individual touch between the human Spirit and the divine, the personal experience of the human man on earth with the divine Man in the heaven, beside and around him, and you build the house of your faith on a rock that nothing can shake nor destroy, and it will shelter you, no matter what storms may rage outside. And so, as in the temple, the whip has been used in order that men may learn what they would not learn by the gentle instruction spoken only in the words of the friend. The enemy has been used for it, the foe, the assailant, who has made sharp his weapons, and has cut many of the old manuscripts in pieces; and the result of that is that the Christian Church is thrown back upon the Christ Himself, no longer seen dimly through history, but in vivid reality before the eyes of the heart of the Christian, and that He will give to Christianity a new life. The mystic belief will come back, and the literal interpretations will fall away. And when that is done, then Christianity shall have renewed its youth and its power, and shall know that the Master is living in His Church, and is still the Master of life and death, as in the olden days.

And by a very real instinct you will find that the most earnest Christians cling to the humanity of Jesus, and that is the value of the Master to us, when inside our hearts is written the truth of His existence. If there were only such men as we, and God, the gulf would be too vast, the difference too terrible—nothing to encourage us to believe that Divinity was within us. We seem so trivial, so foolish, so childish, that we hardly dare sometimes to believe that we are truly God. It seems impossible for us in our modern life, with all the follies in which we spend ourselves, with all the childish ambitions and terrors with which we amuse or frighten ourselves. This little modern life seems so petty and so vulgar that we scarcely dare to believe ourselves divine. We speak of the old heroic days, and think that if we had lived then, we too should have been heroic, as the heroes and martyrs and saints of earlier times. But in truth humanity is just as divine to-day, as it ever was in the past. And if the divine were manifested in us as it was in the great ones of the past, we should be heroic as they were; it is not circumstances that make the difference, but only that the God within us is more in the stage of childhood than in those mighty ones of the past, in which He had risen to the stature of divine manhood. And when we think of the Masters and realise that They are; still more, perhaps, when in some happy moment we catch a glimpse of such divine Men, or feel Their presence closer than that of a human friend, ah! then it is that the inspiration which flows from Them, as from a ceaseless source, encourages and vivifies the life within. For we realise that it was not so very, very long ago that They were as we are, plunged down in the trivialities of earth; that They have climbed above them by the unfolding of the God within. And what They have done, you and I may also do. They are a constant inspiration and encouragement for humanity. They are men, and only God as we are God; the only difference being that They have God more manifest in Them than He is in us. They also in Their day were weak and foolish; They also strove and struggled, as we strive and struggle now; They also failed, as we are failing now; They also blundered, as we are blundering now; and They have risen above it all, strength after strength revealed in Them, wisdom and power and love growing ever more and more divine. And what They have done, you and I can do. For They are truly but the first fruits of humanity, the promise of the harvest, and not something strange, miraculous, and far away. The Christian clings to the manhood of Jesus for the reason that as "He hath suffered, being tempted, He is able to succour them that are tempted." And it is a true instinct, a wise faith, for it is by coming into touch with such links between humanity and God, that you and I in time will become divine. In Him that divine seed of Spirit has unfolded into flower and fruit. When you sow a seed in the soil of your garden, you sow it in the full belief that it will grow, that it will become a plant with leaf and flower and fruit. And you believe it by all the promise of the past, which has proved that out of such seeds grow such flowers; all that is behind you to make your faith a reasonable faith; and when you plant that trivial thing, a little larger than a pin's head, and hide it in the darkness of the ground out of sight, you have a living faith within you that out of that seed shall grow the perfect flower. Have the same faith for the seed of divinity that is planted within you, though it be planted in the darkness of your heart. Even if at present the first little shoot has not come up above the darkness of the soil in which it is buried, none the less the seed is there; it will grow and ripen into the perfect fruit. It must be so. There are no failures for the divine Husbandman, no seed which is not living, which falls from His hands into the ground. And near us the Masters stand ever, the living truth of what man can be—nay, what he shall be in the centuries to come. They are proofs of what you and I shall be, the finished copies of the statues which lie as yet so rough, so unhewn, in the marble of our humanity. That is Their value for all men, and part of Their work is to help us to become what They are, to foster in us every shoot of the spiritual life, to strengthen in us every effort and struggle towards the light. Theirs the glorious work, not only of building up mighty faiths, but of living in them, and pouring out spiritual life on the heart of each who enters within the portals of those faiths. That is Their splendid work; and if Theosophy is doing much in all the religions of the world to make them more real to their adherents, and give to them fresh vitality and strength and vigor, it is only because it is the latest impulse from the Masters of the Wisdom, and so is the most convenient channel through which that life may be poured into all the religions of the world. Only the latest of the impulses. All religions have been born out of such an impulse, and the only difference between this and the earlier impulses is that while they each founded a religion and round that religion a wall was built, so that there were believers inside the wall and unbelievers outside, round this spiritual forthstreaming no walls are to be built, but the waters are to spread everywhere without limitation, without exception. That is the specialty in the message of Theosophy. It belongs to all alike. As much yours, though you do not call it by that name, perhaps, as it is theirs who call it by that name. It is only living, because it lives in every religion; it is only true, because it comes from the same Masters of the eternal Wisdom, belongs equally to all, to every religion that cares to take any of the truth that it has re-proclaimed. And all over the world the glad message is going. There is not one religion which is now living, amongst whose adherents Theosophy is not spreading, and making them better members of their religions than they were before. For there is many a man and woman, in East and West alike, who had gone away from the religion into which they were born, because the mystic element had vanished and the literal sense of the doctrines was in truth the letter which killeth, while the spirit that was life seemed to have escaped. Many such men and women, in East and West, have come back with joy to the religion in which they were born, in realising that it is only an expression of the one divine Wisdom, and that the Masters of the Wisdom live and move amongst us.

And it may be that if the world grows more spiritual, it may be that if Spirit again becomes triumphant over matter, after passing through the darkness which was necessary in order that the intellect might be thoroughly developed and might learn its powers and its limitations; it may be that, in days to come, when the world is more spiritualised than to-day, climbing as it is again the upward arc, these living Masters of the world's religions will come amongst us again visibly as in the earlier days. It is not They who keep back in silence. It is we who shut Them out, and make Their presence a danger rather than an encouragement and an inspiration. And every one of you—no matter what your faith may be, Christian, Hinḍu, Buḍḍhist, Theosophist, what matters it?—every one of you who makes the Master of your own faith a living reality, part of your life, nearer than friend and brother, every such believer and worker is hastening the day of joy when the world shall be ready for the open reception of the Masters, that They may move visibly amongst humanity once more. That it may be so, open your heart to every breath of truth; that it may be so, open your eyes to every ray from the one eternal Sun. In the past the world would have none of the Masters. They slew the Christ; they made the prophets outcasts. And until in our heart the love of the Master awakens, until with passionate longing, with continual insistence, we call to the divine Men the welcome, without which They may not come, They must remain hidden. Only when there comes up from heart after heart one vast chant of devotion and appeal, only then will They come to the many as They have already come to the few, and show out the visible splendor of Their manhood, as the glory of Their divinity has ever been upon the earth.