Lecture VI The Coming Christ
Friends: Looking back over the long story of the past we can see certain mighty, grandiose figures emerging from the great crowd of human beings, men who tower far above their generation, who are giants, as it were, with pigmies around them; however far we look back such figures are ever to be seen, until at last the mists appear to roll across this great vista of the past, and even through those mists we can discover the outlines of great Ones who teach and bless mankind. To the great mass of students these figures, standing out in the past, appear very closely to resemble each other. We cannot, as it were, distinguish Them with regard to Their knowledge or Their power; all are so far above the men of the time, so far above the most advanced humanity of our own day, that it seems impossible to throw Them into any kind of order, or to understand how far They are part of one great group of mighty Beings; what relation They bear to each other we cannot see; what Their rank in the hierarchy of the superhuman we are practically unable to say. But as the occult student tries to study the past, there are certain indications that he can grasp which serve as a kind of guide as to these mighty Beings. He sees great world-cycles of different extent, embracing longer or shorter periods of time, and he is able to trace some relation between these mighty Beings and the cycles of the world, the point of time at which They appear, at which They manifest. And by this study of the past, assisted by occult methods, these periods in the world’s story and these Teachers of the world’s humanity fall into quite definite relations.
We can notice, looking back, that there are four great ages through which the world passes in its long evolutionary history, ages that are often referred to in what are called the mythologies of the past, ages which are characterised very differently the one from the other, and in which the whole cycle of the world’s story is divided. It may be noticed that at the beginning of each of those huge cycles a very great figure appears, as though, when the world was entering on a new phase of life, it were necessary that a special benediction should descend upon it, a special light should shine out. When we ask who are the great Ones who mark these longest periods in human history, we are told that They are Beings belonging to past worlds, belonging to other planets than our own, planets and worlds older in the scale of manifestation; that They have passed through all the struggles of an evolving life, that They have formed part of a humanity that long since has passed away and been numbered in the records of the universe, too far off to touch a world like ours; that, reaching through human to superhuman growth, They have finally joined their consciousness with the consciousness of the Logos Himself, expanding to His consciousness, uniting with His nature, and yet never losing that centre which is the result of Their long evolution up the human and the superhuman ladder. Holding that centre in all the life of God, it is possible for Them to draw around Themselves again a circumference which shall enable Them to become manifest in any world, in any race. Where a centre is, a circumference can ever be drawn; and around such a centre in Deity itself, of the Son made one with the Father, from such a centre a new circumference of a human life may be drawn, and such a Being, mighty in His Deity and yet veiled in humanity, may appear to enlighten and to bless the world. Among the Hindū people, whose teachers have carried them far along occult lines, whose sacred scriptures are full of occult indications, a special name is given to these pre-eminent manifestations. They call them by a Sanskrit word which means those who descend. The name avatāra may be familiar to you, perhaps. But it is the significance of the name on which for a moment I pause. They have climbed up to unity with the God head: They descend to humanity in order to preserve and help. Such are the mightiest figures that appear in any world, on any globe, through the long course of its evolution. Egypt signified that mystery under a special name: they called it the birth of Horus. Christianity has symbolised it under another name—Divine Incarnation; and the Christian will tell you—accurate in the spiritual fact, although at times confused in the definition of the life—that the Second Person of the Trinity descends upon earth, and he regards the Christ of Judea as being such a manifestation of the Most High. The main fact that such a revelation may come to man is a fundamental spiritual truth. It ought never to be lost from sight; and in every great religion it has ever been said that it is from that aspect of the Logos that these manifestations descend upon earth. Christianity recognises but a single manifestation; Hindūism recognises nine that have passed and one that is to come. In Zoroastrianism you find the same conception. Religions, living and dead, have ever groped after that highest of truths; only it must never be lost sight of that He who is an Avatāra, the highest of divine manifestations, has been in some other cycle of life a man among men, and that it is because of that long-past experience that a return to those conditions is possible at any time.
Leave that aside for a moment, and take another great type that shines out. There is no name for the next type I am just thinking of except in Eastern lands, where they call him “The Enlightened,” the Buddha. In the West that name is constantly connected with the last of those manifestations, with the great Being born into the world nearly six hundred years before the Christian era. He is called the Buddha. But among the people of the faith that He gave to the world the belief is that there were many before Him, that there shall be many after Him; that He is only one among the great host of revealers of the divine, and that one of those is born in every world, in every Root Race. So that in every world there are seven of such Beings, one manifesting in every Race; but when He has appeared, then He passes away from earth, having finished even the superhuman evolution, and passes on, as those that I mentioned passed in other worlds, in other times, in order to unite Himself as the Son with the Eternal Father, so that in a world later than our own such a one may return as an Avatāra, one who descends. But note that the Buddha, mighty as He was, climbed to His greatness through the humanity of our own globe. Climbing step by step up the long ladder of human life, of superhuman unfolding, He touched the last rung of that ladder when He was born as Gautama into India some twenty-five centuries ago, and then, having finished His work, passed onward into what is there called Nirvāna, the highest condition available for the superhuman, that of union with the divine, though without loss of the centre of which I spoke.
Considering that great Teacher, let us ask what He was before He became the Buddha, and then passed away from earth, His teaching work being over. Before He took that last and greatest of the Initiations along the line He followed, He had manifested several times before on earth, and manifested in the same great Root Race, the Aryan Race, to which we all and so many others belong. For before that last step was taken there was another high office that He filled for thousands and tens of thousands of years. I do not want in any way to confuse you with unfamiliar names, and yet it is a little difficult to avoid them, because I want a name that stretches back to manifestation after manifestation; and our own fifth sub-race, the Teutonic, has been on earth so brief a time, living in the western world, that it has not yet created the general name which we can use with regard to these past manifestations. The eastern name is a word which translated means “the Wisdom-Truth,” the Bodhisattva; the name matters little provided that you take it for the moment that it signifies an office, and the office is that of the Supreme Teacher, not only teacher of men, but teacher, as they would say, of Gods, as you would say, of Angels and Archangels. For you must remember that the Shining Ones of the East are the same as those to whom over here you give the names of Angels and Archangels. The East calls them by a name which merely means “the shining”; and though it is often translated over here as “God,” much confusion of thought thereby is made as regards the great eastern faiths. For they, like Christianity, proclaim the unity of God, the one all-pervading life; and those whom they call the Shining Ones, the Devas, are but manifestations of that light, the Angels and Archangels of Christianity or of Islām. And He who is the Supreme Teacher has for His pupils Archangels and Angels as well as men; He is the one who is the Teacher of all, whether in the body of flesh or outside of it as spiritual intelligences; there is no other Teacher in earth or heaven above that mightiest One who fills this supreme office.
Now, such a Teacher, the Supreme Teacher of the worlds, makes Himself manifest as man at the beginning of every sub-race. I have talked to you so much of Races and sub-races that the terms will not be unfamiliar; and if I remind you that we are all of one great Root Race, the Aryan, whether you take the first sub-race in India; or the second along the basin of the Mediterranean in the ancient days; or the third in ancient Persia; or the fourth giving birth to the ancient Greeks and the Romans, and then spreading westwards through Spain, France, Britain, up to the North of Scotland, and then across to Ireland, the mighty Keltic sub-race; or the fifth, the Teutonic, now peopling Germany, Britain, America, and their offshoots—if you think of those, the one Race including all the divisions, you will be able readily enough to follow the manifestations of the Supreme Teacher. Just as in the larger cycles there are manifestations of great Beings, so has every successive sub-race the appearance of this great Teacher as man, to give it the religion under which the civilisation shall develop, to give it the benediction which starts it on its evolution in the world.
Looking backwards to the sub-races that preceded the fifth, the Teutonic, to which the greater part of you who are present here belong, we can mark in each the appearance of the Supreme Teacher, taking a different name, but ever the same immortal Individuality under the veil of that name. One name that is known to all of you who are students of the past was the name He took when He led forth from Central Asia the second of the great emigrations that passed westward, which āryanised large numbers of the people dwelling in Arabia, in Northern Africa, in the whole great basin of the Mediterranean. He then bore the name of Hermes, a name familiar to every student of antiquity, especially to the students of Egyptian thought, for it was largely in relation to that that this mighty manifestation was made, and in much of the so-called Hermetic literature the name of Hermes, the Thrice Greatest, is preserved. It was a name first worn in Lemuria, but in this case was used by the Supreme Teacher manifesting for the second sub-race.
Let me pause a moment to say one word of explanation, to meet a difficulty that may readily rise in the minds of the more scholarly amongst you who have looked back to these past tales. You find the same name appearing from time to time along the same tradition. That has ever been so in the past. The name of the great teacher himself has been taken up by his successors, who renewed his teaching and carried on the tradition that he left; and so in the vast spaces of time that have elapsed since that Hermes first appeared in the second root-race of the Aryans, others took up the tradition, carried on the teaching, and the name was ever repeated. It is the eastern way. No disciple dreams of teaching there under his own name; it is under the name of his Master that he gives his wisdom to the world; and that not to conceal, but because it is held that to the teacher the credit belongs of that which the pupil may be able to expound, and so, in humility, in veneration, in gratitude to the mightiest, those who follow Him write under the name that they worship, and so hand on His wisdom, although in generations much later than Himself. It causes much of confusion, much of difficulty when the people with the western historical sense go turning over these ancient writings and applying their own canons of interpretation to people who were ancient long before those canons were invented. What is called the historical sense is a very different thing in the East from that in the West. Historical sense here means a sequence of names, dates, persons, and that is what is regarded as important; in the East it means the God unfolding in the various types of humanity that may appear; and that which they are interested in is not a special individual who has written this, that, or the other, but the teaching, the tradition, handed on from age to age, and ever marked out from the first Revealer, the name of Him who gave the knowledge to mankind. I do not want to dispute which is the better way. I only mark the difference that you may realise that in the likeness of the name there is no attempt to deceive the reader, but only to mark the line of the tradition.
In the second sub-race, then, appeared Hermes. Ages rolled on. The third sub-race was to be born; the emigration to found that sub-race rolled westwards into Persia. Once more the “Wisdom-Truth” led the emigration. To that people he was known as Zarathustra, more often called among us Zoroaster. Fourteen of those are known in the old story of Persia, but the first, the eldest of them all, He alone was that one Supreme Teacher, coming down to His disciples, building the policy of Persia, handing down to those who came after Him the tradition that went by His name; and every great high-priest of that religion worthy to bear the mantle of the great One, he also is known in history as Zoroaster; and, as I have just said, some fourteen of those are named.
The time came for the fourth sub-race, the Keltic; the same great Being came forth again under another name, the name known to every student of Greek thought as that of Orpheus. The Orphic Mysteries, the Orphic tradition—these are phrases familiar to every student of the mighty past of Greece. But the scholars, as a rule, with regard to him will say, as was said in regard to Hermes: This is not an individual; it is only a name for a succession of individuals. There is a truth in that, for there was such a succession. The blunder lies in not realising that such a succession must have an originator, and that the first and mightiest of the teachers, to whom everything ran back, is not necessarily a myth merely because He is so great. Those who started the Sun Myth have done a great deal of harm in clouding the story of the past, and it is only as the buried remains of that past are brought up and studied by the scholars of the time that people find that many of the so-called Sun Myths were mighty Teachers and mighty Kings in the childhood of our race. That has become more and more palpable as the excavations go into deeper and deeper strata, uncover more and more ancient civilisations; so that those who have been made into myths are now taking on again a semblance of humanity, but humanity so great, so divine, that it seems scarcely possible to believe that such Beings lived in the guise of men on earth. But you can trace down that Orphic tradition through all that was mightiest and most beautiful in Greece; you can trace in by the Mysteries I mentioned, by the names of the great Greeks who declared that they took their inspiration from that tradition. So we come to the last of the incarnations of that great Being until He appeared as Gautama, became the Buddha, passed away as teacher from the worlds.
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.