One realises, in looking at an article like this, that by the mystic Christ—that is what the writer means—he means that in the Epistles a somewhat different view is taken from that of the Gospels, the one dealing specially with an historical person, the other with an indwelling Spirit. He realises that when the Apostle Paul declares to his converts that he is travailing in birth for them until Christ be formed in them, when he says in another passage that they are to develop to the measure of the stature of the fulness of Christ, he is holding up before them a picture of the birth in the soul of this divine Spirit that he spoke of as Christ, and the gradual unfolding of that into the perfection of divine manhood. That is perhaps the most inspiring ideal that can well be put before Christian people, that not only outside them but within them, not only as an outer helper but as an indwelling Spirit, this idea of the Christ is to be realised, and that that unfolding of the Christ in man is a real fact in religious consciousness, making that highest stage of human evolution when the man becomes perfect, and there only remains before him the superhuman evolution after the human is finished. But I want to put to you rather a different idea of this relation between Jesus and Christ. I recognise to the full the value of that mystic ideal, I have not one word to say against it; in fact it is one that, when I am speaking to Christians, I constantly proclaim—the absolute necessity of that indwelling presence. But there is another view of this great Being which may be less familiar to you, which is the view taken by those who are sometimes called Occultists, in a very special sense of the term. Let me put it to you quite baldly for the moment, and then work it out a little more. The view that we take of that great Teacher who came to the world some two thousand years ago is, that the child who was born and who grew up into manhood until the time of the Baptism was a man of marvellous purity, of extraordinary spiritual intuition, but a man that we should call a disciple; that it was his to train and guard that pure body in preparation for the incoming of the indwelling Christ, and that in the Gospel story it is the event of the Baptism which marks the coming of the Christ. Let me just recall the words to you for a moment: “When Jesus went down into the water, the heavens opened, and the Spirit of God came down upon Him like a dove, and abode upon Him. And a voice was heard from heaven saying, ‘This is my beloved Son; hear ye Him.’” Now it is clear that that event, marked out so distinctly in the Gospel story, must connote something of enormous importance. There was no need, as it were, for Him who was to be the Teacher to be baptised, and to receive the downcoming Spirit of the Most High, unless in that there was hid some profound spiritual truth, unless something was there afterward that was not there before; and it is _then_, from the occult point of