marked and significant fact, that just in proportion as a religion has lost touch with this aspect of the Divine Life which we call the Life of the Master, so has it tended to become more formal, less highly vitalised, less spiritual, with less of the mystic element in it, and more of the literal; so that it becomes necessary in the efflux of time that every now and again a Master should come forth from the Great White Lodge, and testify again upon earth to the reality of the tie between the Elder Brothers of the race and the younger brothers who are living constantly in the physical world. Now one distinguishing mark of a Master, His chief function, we may say, is to perform the greatest act of sacrifice which is known in the Occult Hierarchy, save the act of the One who is called The Great Sacrifice, the Silent Watcher, whose sacrificial act is still greater than the sacrificial acts performed by Those who are spoken of as Masters. This particular act of sacrifice, occurring from time to time at the beginning of a new epoch in religion and civilisation, is performed by one of the Body, who volunteers to start a further spiritual impulse in the world, and to bear the karma of the impulse that He generates. That may not appear to you at first glance, unless you have gone into the subject carefully, to be such a transcendent act of sacrifice as it really is. It may seem a comparatively small thing to start such an impulse, and very vague probably are the ideas of many of you as to what is implied in the statement "bearing the karma," which the generation of the impulse implies. The great act of sacrifice lies not only in the truth that He is wearing a physical body of coarse matter, which hampers Him from time to time, but that He cannot lay that body aside, once He has used it for giving this great spiritual impulse, until that impulse is entirely exhausted, and the religion, or the association, to which it has given birth has vanished out of the physical world. Take, for instance, the case of the Master, Jesus: He--by His own voluntary act of course, in the beginning, for it is always a volunteer who comes forward; such a sacrifice cannot be imposed--He, voluntarily, giving up His body, and later taking from the Boḍhisaṭṭva the guarding of the infant plant of which the Boḍhisaṭṭva had sown the seed which was to grow into the great tree of Christianity, taking that from Him, He bound Himself by the acceptance of that work to remain in the bonds of the physical body until the Christian Church had completed its work, and until the last Christian had passed away, either into liberation, or re-birth into some other faith. It is the same with the other great religions, so many of which are now dead--the religion of Egypt, of Chaldea, and many another. The Masters who had to do with those have long since cast away Their physical bodies, and thereby ceased to be what we call Masters, because the religion that each gave to the world