view, that the _Jesus_ became the _Christ_. But let me put it to you even a little more closely. Here, of course, is where the point of difference will probably arise in the minds of many in regard to what I am saying, for all might be willing to recognise that that might imply a great downflow of spiritual energy, of divine life. From our standpoint Jesus the Hebrew, the individual, the spiritual man, stepped out of the body that he had been dwelling in through all those years and preparing for the coming of his Lord, giving it over as a holy temple for the incoming of the supreme Teacher, so that the body became the habitation of the supreme Teacher for the three years of the ministry. Now that view, as many of you who have studied Christian history will know, was very widely held in the early Church; although it was condemned later as the Gnostic heresy, none the less it was quite orthodox until its formal condemnation within the Catholic Church, until the time that it was expelled. You find it in many of the early writings of the learned Christian teachers, you find it warred against by some others of the Christian teachers and doctors and bishops of the time, but none the less it was a view which had very wide prevalence in the early Church; it was accepted by large numbers of profoundly learned men; and although ultimately condemned as a heresy in the forms in which it was put, it might none the less not be improbable, even from the standpoint of the orthodox, that some truth was hidden in it in the broad sense, even if the form in which it was put forward in the Church of those days was justly condemned. My own view is that they were right, not in all the details of the way in which they put it, but in the fundamental fact. Let us suppose for a moment that they were so; then the question would necessarily arise—who is the Christ? And it is there that, as I said, there was one view that might be unfamiliar to you in the West, yet which, it seems to me, should be to the Christian a view full of beauty and full of hope for the future. There is only one Supreme Teacher of mankind. There is a great office above all those whom we Theosophists speak of as Masters—a Master of Masters, so to speak—the one Supreme Teacher. In Christendom you speak of him by the Greek name, a name which, as you know, was taken from the Grecian mysteries, of which a particular grade of initiation bore the name of the Christos, and the Adept who reached that grade was spoken of as the Christos. That was the name which was adopted in the early Church, according to the account in the Acts, to designate this great Teacher who had come to the world, and we should say, rightly adopted. It is an instance of spiritual insight recognising a great truth.