thing is
true. The Parsi, representative of a splendid tradition, but whose
religion, as it now, is, as has been well said, "a religion of
fragments" only--he will trace back his religion to his own great
Prophet, the Prophet of the Fire, who led the exodus from the centre of
Asia and guided His people into what we now call the land of Persia.
Egypt, if you ask her story, will show you heroic figures of her past,
and amongst them that great King and Priest, Osiris, who, slain, as the
old legend tells us, rises again, as Lord and Judge of His people.
Buddhism, spread in the far East, will trace back its story to the
Buddha, and will declare in addition to that, that not only is the
Buddha the Teacher of that particular faith, but that a living
person still exists on the earth as Teacher, as Protector, whom they
call the Bodhisattva, the wise and the pure. India will tell
you of a great group of teachers gathered round their Manu, the
tradition of whose laws is still preserved, and is still used as the
basis of the social legislation administered now by the English rulers.
And round that great Lawgiver of the past, wise men are gathered whose
names are known throughout the land, each of them standing at the head
of some noble Indian family, that traces its ancestry backward and
backward till it ends in the Sage, the Teacher. And this is equally true
of more modern religions. Take the Christian religion, and the Christian
traces his religion back until it finds its source in the personality of
the Prophet of Judea, of Jesus the Christ. And it is interesting, as one
of those strange parallels which meet us often in the comparative study
of religions, that just as the Buddhist has his Buddha and
also his Bodhisattva, so the Christian has the two names:
Christ, representing the living Spirit, a stage in the spiritual
unfolding, the name representing a stage, an office, rather than a
special man, and joined to that the individual name of Jesus, in order
to mark the intimate connection, as some would say the identity, between
the two. But just as among the Buddhists the distinction is drawn,
so among the early Christians you will find a similar distinction was
made between the man Jesus and the spiritual Christ. So that in those
early days many of those who were called "Gnostics" divided the two in a
similar fashion, although uniting them at a certain stage of the
teaching, of the ministry. And if you take the latest born of the