often truly and sincerely trying to lead a Christ‐like life, have never paused to reflect over the words of their own _Bible_. “Art thou Elias?” the Jewish priests and Levites asked the Baptist.(109) Their Saviour taught His disciples this grand truth of the Esoteric Philosophy, but verily, if His Apostles comprehended it, no one else seems to have realised its true meaning. No; not even Nicodemus, who, to the assertion: “Except a man be born again(110) he cannot see the Kingdom of God,” answers: “How can a man be born when he is old?” and is forthwith reproved by the remark: “Art thou a master in Israel and knowest not these things?”—as no one had a right to call himself a “Master” and Teacher, without having been initiated into the mysteries (_a_) of a spiritual re‐ birth through water, fire and spirit, and (_b_) of the re‐birth from flesh.(111) Then again what can be a clearer expression as to the doctrine of manifold re‐births than the answer given by Jesus to the Sadducees, “who deny that there is any resurrection,” _i.e._, any re‐birth, since the dogma of the resurrection in the flesh is now regarded as an absurdity even by the intelligent clergy: They who shall be accounted worthy to obtain that world [Nirvâna](112) ... neither marry ... neither can they die any more, which shows that they had already died, and more than once. And again: Now that the dead are raised even Moses shewed ... he calleth the Lord the God of Abraham, and the God of Isaac, and the God of Jacob, for he is not a God of the dead but of the living.(113) The sentence “now that the dead _are raised_” evidently applied to the then actual re‐births of the Jacobs and the Isaacs, and not to their future resurrection; for in such case they would have been still dead in the interim, and could not be referred to as “the living.” But the most suggestive of Christ’s parables and “dark sayings” is found in the explanation given by him to his Apostles about the blind man: Master, who did sin, this man or his parents, that he was born blind? Jesus answered, Neither hath this [blind, physical] man sinned nor his parents; but that the works of [his] God should be made manifest in him.(114)