should be their teachers and saviours, are left in their ignorance, to become slaves of the most degrading superstitions. Perhaps the most deplorable result of this system is the necessary and almost universal degradation of woman.

92. These Mystic Brotherhoods in their seclusion from and attitude towards the outside world and the bustling activities of the external life, have, in spite of their vast intellectual resources and occult knowledge, come to look upon the material wealth, splendor and boasted superiority of our Western civilization and culture as but the tinseled gilding of delusive and empty shams; and regard with a sort of pitiable contempt our sordid ambitions, greed of gold, ostentatious display and self-glorification, and, it must be confessed, not altogether without reason. They have some quite as important lessons for us as we have for them. Let us not be too slow in learning these lessons.

93. The one vitally important factor emphasized in the teaching and example of the Master, which the Christians have so sadly neglected, these Easterns have most earnestly taken up and faithfully pursued as a science; but failing to grasp the Christ-basis of religion, have made, practically, a religion of their philosophy, an abnormal development of a metaphysical intellectuality at the expense of a true spirituality.

94. Through absorption in the cultivation and development of their intellectual and psychic powers,

and corresponding neglect of their deeper spiritual nature, these Eastern Magi failed to find what many Christians have found, the glad recognition of God as "Our Father in heaven," to be the only basis of a genuine religion, a religion of love, sympathy and service, and thus of universal Brotherhood. How can there be a human Brotherhood which includes the Sisterhood, without a corresponding Deific Fatherhood and Motherhood?

95. A cold, unsympathetic, exclusive and secluded order of anchorites are no healthy type of human brotherhood, or true representatives of the regenerate life and society proposed by the Christ, and exemplified in his own and Apostolic life and character. The same thing in the monastic orders of the Christian Church is just as far from the true Christ type as that found among the followers of Buddha, from whom it was borrowed and adopted.

96. The monastic life of asceticism and retirement from the world, whether in Buddhistic or Christian monasteries, is neither a necessity nor the true method of attaining spiritual emancipation, and the realization of the perfect life of true wisdom and power represented in and by the Christ. The entire system is based upon a misapprehension of the true nature of the soul, and of its relation to the Cosmos or Macrocosm.

97. Jesus, our supreme Exemplar, was neither a recluse nor an ascetic; had he been he could not have been the Christ. Yet he did not wholly con

demn the practice, and openly commended the motive that prompted it. John the Baptist was both a recluse and ascetic, and speaking of him as such, in contrast with his own life, he said: "Wisdom is justified of all her children."

98. The contrasts here drawn between the strong and weak points of the Oriental and the Western peoples is meant to apply to the practical working of the one-sided theological and philosophical systems adopted by each, yet there have ever been glorious exceptions to this general picture under both systems. Our object here is simply to point to the certain failure of reaching perfect results by any system of one-sided culture, whether in the direction of religion or science. The true system or ideal and method will best be seen by the direct study of the life and teaching of the Master; because he exemplified in his own experience the doctrine that he taught.

VI.

THE MASTER.

99. "AND John calling unto him two of his disciples sent them to Jesus, saying, Art thou he that should come? or look we for another? And in that same hour he cured many of their infirmities and plagues, and of evil spirits; and unto them that were blind he gave sight. Then Jesus answering said unto them, Go your way, and tell John what things ye have seen and heard, how that the blind see, the lame walk, the lepers are cleansed, the deaf hear, the dead are raised, to the poor the gospel is preached. And blessed is he whosoever shall not be offended in me."

"When Christ cometh, will he do more than these which this man hath done?"

If we carefully study the recorded life and character of Jesus in the direct light of his own teaching, independent of the bias and glamour of tradition, we find in him not in any sense a supernatural being, but simply the actualized embodied fruition of the divinest possibilities of the universal humanity; hence he called himself the Son of Man.

100. In the recognition of the fundamental truth upon which the Christ teaching was based, and which he specifically emphasized throughout his

teaching, viz., that all men are the immediate and direct sons of God, holding potentially the Deific nature and attributes, and therefore the inherent capacity for immediate divine realization and perfection of being, he simply stands before the world, as already suggested, the Typal Man, the representative Son of God and Brother of men, and the representative Son of God; because the representative Son of Man, the true type of the perfected humanity.

101. Jesus claimed this for himself and nothing more; and he was also thus understood by his immediate followers and ordained Apostles. No higher honor could indeed be given him by God or man. Peter, one of the first called by the Master for an Apostle, who was admitted into the most confidential relations with him during his earthly ministry, speaks of him as "a man approved of God among you by miracles and wonders and signs which God did by him in the midst of you, as ye yourselves also know;" whom "God anointed with the Holy Spirit and with power, who went about doing good, and healing all that were oppressed of the devil; for God was with him." Had the Master claimed more than this for himself, surely Peter, his foremost Apostle, would have been the first to proclaim it.

102. The open secret of this power of Jesus was that he dwelt and walked in the fully awakened consciousness of oneness with the Father, and of the