This saying about the way, the truth and the life is capable of opening the doors of eternity. It sounds to man out of the depths of his soul, if his self-knowledge is true and real. Such reflections as these open up, in a double sense, the vision of the spiritual guidance of the individual and of collective humanity. As human beings we are able, through self-knowledge, to find the Christ within us as the guide Whom, since His life on earth, we can always reach, because He is always in man. And further, if we apply to the historical records that we have apprehended without them, we discover their real nature. They express historically something which is revealed of itself in the depths of the soul. They are therefore to be accounted as _guiding_ humanity in the same direction as the soul itself is proceeding. If we thus understand the suggestion of eternity in the words, “I am the way, the truth and the life,” we cannot feel ourselves justified in asking, “Why does a person who has passed through many incarnations always re-enter life as a child?” For it becomes evident that this apparent imperfection is an ever-recurring reminder of the Highest that is in man. And we cannot be reminded often enough,--at any rate each time we enter earthly life is not too often to be reminded,--of the great fact of what man really is with reference to that Being who underlies all earthly existence, without being touched by its imperfections. It is not well to make many definitions or summaries in occult science or theosophy, or indeed in occultism generally. It is better to give a description, and to try and call forth a feeling of what really exists. On this account we are now attempting to induce a feeling of what distinguishes the first three years of human life, and of the way in which this is related to the light that streams from the cross on Golgotha. The meaning of this feeling is that an impulse is passing through human evolution, and that through this impulse the Pauline saying, “Not I--but the Christ in me,” will become a fact. We have only to know what man is in reality, in order to be able to proceed from such knowledge to insight into the nature of the Christ. When once, however, we have arrived at the Christ-idea through true observation of humanity, we know that we discover the Christ in the best way if we first look for Him in ourselves, and if we then return to the Bible records, these are for the first time rightly valued. And no one prizes the Bible more, or more consciously, than one who has found the Christ in this way. It is possible to imagine a being, let us say an inhabitant of Mars, descending to earth, without ever having heard of the Christ and His work. Much that has taken place on earth would be incomprehensible to the Martian; much that interests people nowadays would not interest him. But it would interest him to discover the central impulse of earthly evolution,