ave the act of the One who is called The Great
Sacrifice, the Silent Watcher, whose sacrificial act is still greater
than the sacrificial acts performed by Those who are spoken of as
Masters. This particular act of sacrifice, occurring from time to time
at the beginning of a new epoch in religion and civilisation, is
performed by one of the Body, who volunteers to start a further
spiritual impulse in the world, and to bear the karma of the impulse
that He generates. That may not appear to you at first glance, unless
you have gone into the subject carefully, to be such a transcendent
act of sacrifice as it really is. It may seem a comparatively small
thing to start such an impulse, and very vague probably are the ideas
of many of you as to what is implied in the statement "bearing the
karma," which the generation of the impulse implies. The great act of
sacrifice lies not only in the truth that He is wearing a physical
body of coarse matter, which hampers Him from time to time, but that
He cannot lay that body aside, once He has used it for giving this
great spiritual impulse, until that impulse is entirely exhausted, and
the religion, or the association, to which it has given birth has
vanished out of the physical world. Take, for instance, the case of
the Master, Jesus: He--by His own voluntary act of course, in the
beginning, for it is always a volunteer who comes forward; such a
sacrifice cannot be imposed--He, voluntarily, giving up His body, and
later taking from the Bodhisattva the guarding of the infant
plant of which the Bodhisattva had sown the seed which was to
grow into the great tree of Christianity, taking that from Him, He
bound Himself by the acceptance of that work to remain in the bonds of
the physical body until the Christian Church had completed its work,
and until the last Christian had passed away, either into liberation,
or re-birth into some other faith. It is the same with the other great
religions, so many of which are now dead--the religion of Egypt, of
Chaldea, and many another. The Masters who had to do with those have
long since cast away Their physical bodies, and thereby ceased to be
what we call Masters, because the religion that each gave to the world
had done its work, and no souls remained who could be further helped
by passing through the teaching and the training of that particular
religion. This is the central idea of the act of sacrifice, and it
becomes the more a sacrificial act be