London Lectures of 1907. Annie Besant

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