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them into the spiritual world what they have won in the physical. And from
the spiritual world it then flows back again into the earthly sense-world,
since reincarnated souls, on re-entering earth-life, bring with them what
the Christ-impulse between death and a new birth, has bestowed.

What flowed into human evolution with the appearance of the Christ, acted
in it like a seed. Only slowly can this seed mature. Only the smallest
part of these profound new wisdom teachings, up to the present time, has
reached down into physical existence. Christian evolution has just barely
begun. During the successive periods of time following the appearance of
the Christ, this Christian Evolution was able to reveal only so much of
its inner essential nature as the humanity, the peoples of that time, were
capable of receiving; only as much as they could grasp with their
faculties of comprehension. The first form into which this essence of
Christianity could be poured may be described as a comprehensive ideal of
life. As such it was opposed to those forms of life which had been
developed in post-Atlantean humanity. The conditions operating in human
evolution since the repopulation of the earth in the Lemurian period have
been described above. Accordingly, humanity can be traced back to
different beings who, coming from other worlds, incarnated in the bodily
descendants of the ancient Lemurians. The various races of man are a
consequence of this, and the most diverse vital interests appeared in
these reincarnated souls, as a result of their Karma. As long as all this
was being worked out, there could be no ideal of "universal humanity."
Human nature originated in unity, but earthly evolution up to the present
time has led to division. In the figure of the Christ, we see an ideal
which opposes all division, for in the man who bears the name of Christ
there lives the lofty Sun-being from Whom every human ego is descended.
The Hebrew nation still felt itself to be a nation, and each individual a
member of that nation. When once the idea was grasped that in Christ-Jesus
there lives the ideal Man who stands above all that tends to divide
humanity, Christianity became the Ideal of an all-Embracing brotherhood.
Above all individual interests and relations, the feeling arose in some
that the innermost ego of all human beings is of the same origin. (In
addition to all the earthly forefathers, the great common Father of all
humanity appears. "I a