would be no robbery and no murder in your land." Always the highest with the weight of responsibility; the younger with the right to enjoy, to be happy, to be cared for. Where food was short, they were the last to starve, and the King the first; where anything went short of material things, they were the first to be given their share, and the King the last. Such was the outline of the social organisation. Slight traces of it remain even to the present day. You can see traces of it in the civilisation that was destroyed in Peru by the conquerors, the Spanish conquerors, of that land. Some traces of it still remain in India, although degraded and decayed. The note is always the same: the higher, the more burdened; the higher, the harder the life; the higher, the greater the duty. For that is the type of the Master, and the idea ran through the whole of the civilisation. He, the Priest-King, mighty in knowledge and in power, must bear upon his broad shoulders the burden that would crush a weaker man. And so downwards through all the degrees of ruler, in proportion to the power and its expansion, so in proportion the weight and the responsibility.

They passed away from earth as humanity grew out of its infant stage. My phrase is too strong—I should not have said: "They passed away from earth." They passed away into silence, not from earth; thereon many of Them still remain. But They drew back from the outer position, from outer power, and became the great company of Elder Brothers of humanity, only some of whom remained in close touch with the race.

And that is the next point in the idea of the Master. Those who founded a religion were bound to remain wearing the body of man, fixed to the earth, bound to the outward semblance of humanity, so long as the religion lived upon earth which They had given to it. That was the rule: no liberation for the Man who founded a religion until all who belonged to that religion had themselves passed out of it, into liberation, or into another faith, and the religion was dead. The death of a religion is the liberation from all bondage of the Master who gave it to the world. He in a very real sense is incarnate in the religion that He bestows. While that religion lives and teaches, while men still find in it the expression of their thought, so long that divine Man must remain, and guide and protect and help the religion which He gave to earth. Such is the law. No Master may leave our humanity while that which He started as a human school is still existing upon earth. Some have passed away, and would no longer be spoken of as Masters—the name given to Them in the occult world is different—but Those who have passed away have passed away because Their religions are dead: the Masters of ancient Egypt, of ancient Chaldea, have gone from this earth into the mighty company of Those who no longer bear the burden of the flesh. But the Masters of every living religion live on earth, and are the links, for the people of that religion, between God and man; the Master is the divine Man, one with his brothers, who look to him for help, one with the God around and above, and through Him the spiritual life is ever flowing. The word "mediator," applied in the Christian scriptures to the Christ, signifies a real and living relation. There are such mediators between God and man, and they are all God-men, true Christs. Such links between the God without and the God within us are necessary for the helping by the one, and for the manifestation of the other. The God within us, unfolding his powers, answers to the God without us, and the link is the God-man who shares the manifested nature of divinity, 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