This doctrine of the Christ, and our relation to Him, is a Platonic doctrine. Says Dr. Ackermann, "The safest way to a living apprehension of the Platonic Idea proceeds from the true apprehension of impersonality in consciousness, and this in its relation to the Godhead. He who grasps himself in thought, and apprehends and finds himself in himself and at the same time in another, viz., in God, to him it will no longer be obscure and unintelligible what Plato meant by ideas." (Christian Element in Plato, p. 186.) It is a doctrine much older than Plato, and existed in the minds of men as a saving truth before the foundation of the pyramids was laid.

CHAPTER XXII.

THE RELATION OF JESUS TO THE CHRIST AND TO MAN.

AFTER what has been said in the preceding section, it only remains to say a few words respecting the relation of Jesus to the Christ of Paul. As all human minds are connected through a universal mind, through Jesus as an inlet the Christ entered into humanity, and deposited in it the germ of a new and higher life. In a preeminent degree, he was an incarnation of the Christ,— not that no one else ever was, for all spiritually enlightened mind is a manifestation of the Christ and the Word. But owing to the unexampled spiritual evolution of the man Jesus, his individual life became merged and blended into a unity with the " Only-Begotten of the Father," the Universal Christ. In him also the Word was made flesh or manifested on the psychical plane of mind, and we beheld his glory. And his intelligent mastery of the natural forces indicated his union with the Adonai or Lord who has all power in the heavens and the earth. In Jesus we witness a complete humanized expression of the Christ, the Word and the Spirit. His personality is an inlet and an outlet of those universal divine principles, and a medium through which they may enter into each one of us, and through which the human race may have access to them. In him and through him we may have an actual communication with the Christ," in whom are hid all the treasures of wisdom and knowledge," as we can have through no other man of human history. If this is true (and I fully believe it is), why need we go any farther to find all the instruction we need in the divine science of spiritual things. Coming

Jesus conducts us

into sympathetic relation with him, I am brought into conjunction with the fountain of all true wisdom, and it may flow into my mind according to the degree of my receptivity. For neither Jesus or the Christ have ever removed out of hailing nearness to the human spirit. In his second coming or advent as the Paraclete, "the Spirit of truth," he promised to teach his disciples all things and guide them into all truth; in fact, to make known to us those many things concerning the mysteries of the kingdom of God, which he had to say, but men were not then able to receive. There is no doubt that all that was ever known by man still exists in the world of mind, and through Jesus may be communicated to the spirit of man; so that there is nothing hid, no occult wisdom, that may not be revealed. For Jesus was and is familiar with it all, and it is the nature and animus of Christianity to make what was confined to the few in past ages the common property of man. It is but three steps upward to communion with the Highest. to the Christ, and the Christ to the Father. He has been lifted up or elevated on the mystic cross, not merely the wood of Calvary, the place of skulls, but the Hermetic cross as "the tree of life,"— and from his spiritual altitude he is drawing all men unto him. (John xii: 32.) Jesus represents not merely an Oriental Christ, but the Universal Messiah or anointing One. What he said to one he said to all mind in that condition. (Mark xiii: 37.) No word he ever uttered can be lost beyond recall. (John xiv: 26.) It still exists in mind. In Jesus as a man raised up to represent all humanity, the Christ touched with a vivifying contact our psychical nature, and that need not be suppressed by extreme ascetic mortifications, as is done in Brahmanism, and the lower Buddhism, but may be lifted up entire, as Moses symbolically lifted up the serpent in the wilderness, the representative of the sensual principle in man. So in Jesus, every 66 son of man" a Kabalistic expression for the

human soul—may be elevated from a mere sensuous or psychical plane of thought to a true spiritual life, with all its tranquil blessedness. An invocation directed to Jesus will reach the listening ear of an ever-present and never-distant Christ. The Christ of whom I have spoken might seem to many to be too abstract a conception, too transcendental, until men are raised to a higher spiritual level. But in Jesus we have a principle of mediation. In him the Christ becomes objective, and through him my thought-utterances and heart-cravings may reach the heart of the Christ, as certainly as the sound vibrations of my voice may be heard by my friend, far removed from my sight, through the telephonic wire and its ethereal vibrations. After long and patient study of the Christ of Paul and his relation to the human spirit, the real life of man, and the relation of Jesus to the Christ and to humanity, I can say to the world, as the inspired apostles said to the Jews on the day of Pentecost, "Let all the house of Israel know assuredly that God hath made this Jesus whom ye crucified both Lord and Christ." (Acts ii: 36.) And if any one asks, What must I do to be saved (or healed of sin and disease), the shortest, most definite, and divinely efficacious prescription I could give is, " Believe in the name of the Lord Jesus Christ, and thou shalt be saved." Believe in him for all his name implies. For Jesus is presented to us in the Christian system as able to save to the uttermost (or to the remotest boundary of our being, the body) all that come unto God by him, seeing he ever liveth to make intercession for us (or to execute the divinely established function of mediation between us and the only saving power in the universe, and which is concealed in his name). If he cannot save, I know not where to look, or to whom to apply. In the formula fidei or condensed expression of faith of Buddhism, which is called Trisharana or "the three refuges," it is said, "I take my refuge in Buddha, Dharma, and Samgha." By Dharma is meant the doctrines, teachings,

and precepts of Gautama. Samgha signifies the assemblies and ritualistic observances of the Church. After a careful study, pursued without prejudice, of the system of Buddhism, both in its theoretical and practical aspects, while acknowledging in it much that is divinely true, and identical with Christianity, I am still constrained to say, "I take my refuge in Jesus the Christ." In every age of the world God has raised up extraordinary men, and imparted to them a high degree of light from the living Word. Such was Moses, Zoroaster, Confucius, Plato, and above all Gautama the Buddha. There was many a stray beam of the living light of the Logos in all their systems, but it does not come in a form to be easily and practically appropriated by the souls of men in general. And if Jesus should say to me as he did to the twelve select disciples, when many of his shallow followers were leaving him, "Will you also go away?" I should be constrained to say, as all the world's great teachers passed in procession before the mind, "Lord, to whom shall I go? Thou hast the words of eternal life." (John vi: 68.) In Jesus we may come into saving contact with the "Word of Life." (I John i: 2.) In no person was there ever so conscious a union with God, as even Renan affirms. The philosopher Porphyry was united to God, as he says, but twice in his life, while his teacher Plotinus had been six times. They had come to the perception of their own inner divine spirit, the Augoeides, or shining One, of the philosopher initiates. But a conscious and inseparable union with God was the normal condition of Jesus. And there is no shorter or better route to the attainment of the highest spiritual light and life than a sympathetic conjunction with Jesus, the Way, the Truth, and the Life. For that eternal Life which was with the Father is manifested in him, and brought within our grasp. In the Pauline development of Christianity, when rescued from the dogmas of a theology that has been grafted upon it, and freed from the shell of exoteric Judaism and