It ought never to be lost from sight; and in every great religion it has ever been said that it is from that aspect of the Logos that these manifestations descend upon earth. Christianity recognises but a single manifestation; Hindūism recognises nine that have passed and one that is to come. In Zoroastrianism you find the same conception. Religions, living and dead, have ever groped after that highest of truths; only it must never be lost sight of that He who is an Avatāra, the highest of divine manifestations, has been in some other cycle of life a man among men, and that it is because of that long-past experience that a return to those conditions is possible at any time. Leave that aside for a moment, and take another great type that shines out. There is no name for the next type I am just thinking of except in Eastern lands, where they call him “The Enlightened,” the Buddha. In the West that name is constantly connected with the last of those manifestations, with the great Being born into the world nearly six hundred years before the Christian era. He is called the Buddha. But among the people of the faith that He gave to the world the belief is that there were many before Him, that there shall be many after Him; that He is only one among the great host of revealers of the divine, and that one of those is born in every world, in every Root Race. So that in every world there are seven of such Beings, one manifesting in every Race; but when He has appeared, then He passes away from earth, having finished even the superhuman evolution, and passes on, as those that I mentioned passed in other worlds, in other times, in order to unite Himself as the Son with the Eternal Father, so that in a world later than our own such a one may return as an Avatāra, one who descends. But note that the Buddha, mighty as He was, climbed to His greatness through the humanity of our own globe. Climbing step by step up the long ladder of human life, of superhuman unfolding, He touched the last rung of that ladder when He was born as Gautama into India some twenty-five centuries ago, and then, having finished His work, passed onward into what is there called Nirvāna, the highest condition available for the superhuman, that of union with the divine, though without loss of the centre of which I spoke.