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 Hinḍus, the religion of the Buḍḍhists, 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 Hinḍuism, the Manu, who is the Lord really of the whole of the Fifth Root Race; in the case of Buḍḍhism, the Buḍḍha, who is a teacher of all gods and men before He takes up His place as the illuminated, the supreme Buḍḍha. 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 Buḍḍha." 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 Buḍḍha"—not a very comfortable name, because it gives one the idea of a corpse—that is, empty bodies of the Buḍḍha 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 Boḍhisaṭṭva, 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 Âṭmic, sometimes called the nirvÂṇic, 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 Arhaṭship 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 Âṭmic 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 buḍḍhic; one more when you take in the Âṭmic; 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 buḍḍhic 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 Âṭmic 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 Samskṛiṭ 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 JÎvanmukṭas (the name you so often find in our books in relation to the Masters) but Mukṭas, 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 Boḍhisaṭṭva the guarding of the infant plant of which the Boḍhisaṭṭva 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 Buḍḍha 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.

The time came, as most of you know, I suppose, for an effort of some sort to be made. It had been so since the fourteenth century, for it was in the thirteenth century that in Tibet a mighty personage then living in that land, promulgated His order to the Lodge that at the close of every century an effort should be made to enlighten the "white barbarians of the West." That order having gone forth, it became necessary, of course, to obey it; for in those regions disobedience is unknown. Hence at the close of each century—as you may verify for yourselves if you choose to go through history carefully, beginning from the time when Christian Rosenkreuz founded the Rosicrucian Society late in the fourteenth century—you will find on every occasion, towards the close of the century, a new ray of light is shed forth. Towards the close of the last century—I do not mean the one to which we belong, but the century before, the eighteenth—a mighty effort was made, of which the burden fell upon two great personages closely connected with the Lodge, though neither of them, I believe, at that time was a Master—he who was then known as the Comte de St. Germain, who is now one of the Masters, and his colleague in that great task, closely allied to him, of a noble Austrian family, known to us in later days as H.P.B. When those made their attempt to change the face of Europe, they failed, the time not being ripe; the misery and the wretchedness of the epoch, the degradation of the masses of the population, the horrible poverty, the shameful starvation, all these were the rocks on which split, and was broken up into foam, the spiritual wave of which those two personages were the crest. The karma of that, for the one whom we know of as H.P.B., was the trying and suffering incarnation that she spent amongst us, when she founded, under the order of her Master, the Theosophical Society, and gave her life to it that it might live. And it was that fact, that the last great spiritual effort had been drowned in bloodshed, it was that which gave her her marked horror of mixing up the spiritual movement with a political effort, which made her realise that before a spiritual movement could be successful in the outer world it must shape, raise, remodel the conscience of those who were affected by it, that it must not dare to put its hand as a whole to any great political or social movement before it was strong enough to control the forces which it evoked. Hence her shrinking from all idea of this Society plunging, as a Society, into political work or social reform. Not that individuals of the Society might not do it, not that members of it might not use their best thought and energy in order to bring forward and strengthen any movement which was really for the benefit of mankind; but that the Society as a Society, as the vehicle of this great torrent of life, must not pour that torrent into any physical and earthly vessel, lest again it should break the vessel into pieces, lest again it should put the hands of the clock back, instead of forward, as was done in France. So for this time it was to be a spiritual movement, and the work was to be spiritual, intellectual, and ethical. Those were to be its special marks, this its special work; and when the two great Teachers who were identified with the movement—her own Master and His closest co-worker in the Great White Lodge, the two who over and over again in centuries gone by had stood side by side as fellow-workers in the civilisations of the past—when They volunteered for this great emprise, doubt, as I said, arose among Their peers. The lesson of the eighteenth century was not forgotten; the question inevitably arose: "Is the West ready for a movement of this sort again? Can it be carried on in such an environment without doing, perhaps, more harm than the good which it is capable of accomplishing?" And so, much discussion arose—strange as that may sound to some, in connection with a body of workers so sublime—and most were against it, and declared the time was not ripe; but these two offered to take the risk and bear the burden, offered to bear the karma of the effort, and to throw their lives into the shaping, guiding, and uplifting. And as the question of time is always one of the most complicated and difficult questions for Those who have to deal with the great law of cycles and the evolution of man, it was felt that it was possible that the effort might succeed, even although the time was not quite ripe, the clock had not quite struck the hour. And so permission was given, and the two assumed the responsibility. How the earlier stages were made is familiar to you all; how they chose that noble worker Their disciple, known to us as H.P.B., and prepared her for the work she had to do; how in due course They sent her to America to search there for a comrade who would supply what was lacking in herself—the power of organisation, the power of speaking to men and gathering them around him, and shaping them into a movement in the outer world. And you all know the story of how they met; you all know how they joined hands together. One of them has put the whole thing on record, for the instruction of the younger members of the Society now and in centuries to come. The movement began, as you know, closely watched over, constantly protected by those two who had taken this burden of responsibility upon Themselves. And you may read in many of H.P.B.'s letters, how continual in those days was the touch, how constant the directions; and it went on thus year after year—for the first seven years at least of the Society's life, and a little more; you may read in the issue of the Theosophist (June) a letter from one of these same Teachers, showing how close was the interest taken, how close the scrutiny which was kept up in all the details of the Society's work. In publishing that letter I thought it only right to strike out the names which occur in the original. It would not be right or fair to print those publicly yet, as you can perfectly well see when you are able to supply the blanks which are left for names. You may read in that letter how the Master who wrote it had been watching the action of a particular branch, how He had marked in connection with another branch some of the members of the branch who were working ill or not well; how He pointed out that such-and-such members would be better out of the branch than in it, were hinderers rather than helpers—all going to show how close was the watch which They then kept upon the branches of Their infant Society. And so again you may read in other letters than that, suggestions of writing letters to newspapers, and so on, which would strike you as very trivial if they came from the Masters at the present time; how a letter might be written here, an article answered there; how a leading article ought not to be allowed to remain with its false suggestions to the injury of the Society, and so on. But there came a time, with the increase of the numbers in the Society, when many came in who had not the strong belief of the outer founders in the reality of the life of the Masters and Their connection with the Theosophical Society, and disputes and arguments arose. And if you turn back to the Theosophist of those days you will see a great deal of discussion going on as to who were the Brothers, and what They did, and what relation they bore to the Society, and so on; until at last They grew a little weary of this continual challenging of Their life, and work, and interest, and gave the warning which still exists amongst the papers of the Society, that unless before a very short time these questions were set at rest, and the fact of Their relation to the Society was generally recognised, They would withdraw again for a time into the silence in which They had remained so long, and would wait until conditions were more favorable before they again took Their active part in the guiding of the Society's work. Unfortunately the warning was not taken, and so the withdrawal into the comparative silence took place, and the Society entered on that other cycle of its work on which, as you know, the judgment of the Master was passed in the quotation I made the other day, that "the Society has liberated itself from our grasp and influence, and we have let it go; we make no unwilling slaves. It is now a soulless corpse, a machine run so far well enough, but which will fall to pieces when.... 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." Thus Their relations to the Society of the time altered, became less direct, less continual. Their direct influence was confined to individuals and withdrawn for the Society at large, save as to general strengthening, not because They desired it should be so, but because so the Society desired, and the Society is master of its own destiny, and may shape its own fate according to the will of its majority. Still They watched over it, though not permitted to "interfere" with its outer working so much as They had done in the earlier days, and H.P.B. was obliged to declare that They did not direct it. The relation remained, but was largely in abeyance, latent to some extent, as we may say, and They were waiting for the time when again the possibility might open before Them of more active work within the movement which They had started, whose heavy karma They were compelled to bear.

The fact that They bear the karma of the Society as a whole, seems to me one which members of the Society ought never to forget; for, coming into this movement as we have done, finding through the Society the teachings which have changed our lives, having received from it the light which has made all our thought different, which has rendered life intelligible, and life on other planes familiar, at least in theory, and to some in practice, it would seem that the very commonest gratitude, such as men or women of the world might feel for some small benefactions shown by friend to friend, that even that feeling, small and poor as it is, might live in the heart of every member towards Those who have made the existence of the Theosophical Society possible. I do not mean, of course, in those who do not believe in the fact of Their existence; and there are, quite rightly and properly, many such amongst us; for it is the foundation of the Theosophical Society that men of all opinions may come within its ranks and benefit by the splendor of its teachings, whether or not they accept them one by one. Their non-belief does not alter the fact that the teachings come to them through the Society, and from Those who made the Society a living organism upon earth. Nor do I mean in saying that this feeling of gratitude should exist in the heart of each, that anyone need take the particular view of the Masters which I myself take, founding that view, it may be, on more knowledge than very many of those who reject it personally can be said to possess. In all these matters every member is free, and I am only urging upon you your responsibility at least to try to understand, where you touch matters of such far-reaching importance; and at least to consider that you should not add to the burden on those mighty shoulders more than you can avoid adding. Now none of us, whatever we may happen to know—the differences of knowledge between us are trivial as compared with the difference between all of us and Them—can surely escape the duty of considering whether by his own ignorance, and carelessness, and folly, and indifference, he is adding to that burden which They bear. For They cannot avoid taking the karma that you and I largely generate, by virtue of Their unity with this Society, and the fact that Their life circulates through it, and that They have sacrificed Themselves in order that it may live. By that sacrifice they cannot avoid sharing the karma that you and I are making by every careless thought, by every foolish action, by every wilful or even not wilful ignorance, the burden that They have taken out of love for man and for his helping. And I have often thought, when I have been trying dimly to understand the mysteries of this divine compassion, and the greatness of the love and of the pity which moves those mighty Ones to mix themselves up with our small, petty selves, I have often thought how strange must seem to Them, from Their position, the indifference with which we take such priceless blessings, the indifference with which we accept such mighty sacrifice. For the love that These deserve at our hands is surely beyond all claim of kindred, of blood, of touch between man and man; the claim that They have upon us, these Men who are Masters and Teachers, for what They have given and made possible for you and me, seems to me a claim beyond all measuring, a debt beyond all counting. And when one looks at the Society as a whole, and realises how little as a whole it takes account of those deep occult truths into touch with which it has come, how little it realises how mighty the possibility that these supreme acts of sacrifice have opened before every one of us, it seems almost too sad to be credible, too pathetic to be expressed; one realises how sometimes Their hearts must be wrung, as the heart of the Christ was wrung when He stood and looked over Jerusalem, and knew that the people to whose race He belonged were driving further and further away their possibilities, and were despising that which He had brought for their redemption. How often His cry: "Jerusalem, Jerusalem, thou that killest the prophets and stonest them that are sent unto thee, how often would I have gathered thee together as a hen gathereth her chickens under her wings, and ye would not"—how often must that same cry go out from the heart of the Masters, when They look at the movement for which They are responsible, and realise how little its greatness is understood by those who are its members, and are reckoned within its pale.[1] For if even for one brief hour you could realise the heart of the Master, and what He feels and knows with regard to this movement which is His, it seems to me that in the light of even that brief meditation there would be a throwing away of personalities, there would be a trampling down of silly pride, a casting aside of careless obstinacy, a yearning to have some share in the sacrifice, and to give ourselves, however petty we may be, side by side with that sublime sacrifice which They are making year after year for us, unworthy of Their compassion. And yet nothing less than that is the movement which lives by Their life; nothing less than that is the relation of the Masters to the Theosophical Society. They bear it in Their heart, They bear it on Their shoulders, They offer daily sacrifice that this spiritual effort may succeed in the helping and the uplifting of the world. And They, so great, speak to us, so small; and none will surely refuse to listen who catches one glimpse of the possibility of Their speech; none will reject Their pleading, who can hear one whisper of that Voice; and the one thing that one hopes for, that one longs for, with regard to oneself and to all who are members of the Society, is that amongst us there may be some ears found to hear the voice of the Masters, and some hearts mirroring enough of their compassion to at least sacrifice themselves for the helping of the world.

[1] This was spoken some weeks before the issue of Mr. Sinnett's extraordinary manifesto, denying "the things most surely believed among us."