ntract, sacrifice, made between man's
representative and God; but the effort of the divine to make itself
understood, and the voluntary binding of the sacrifice to the cross
of matter until His people are set free. And then, as I said, He
passes on into other worlds, to other work, and is no longer called a
Master of the Wisdom.

Now, looking at this idea, let us ask: "What is the work of these
Masters in the religions of the world, and why is it that this thought
of the Masters has been so revived in the modern world, and made so
much more living, in a sense, than it has been for many a long year?"
In the early days of Christianity, as I said, you find the idea; but
it has largely vanished from the Churches as a living truth, and they
think of Jesus, the Christian Master, as risen from the dead and
ascended into heaven. And the materialising spirit of ignorance has
made the ascent a going away, and the Man has gone, although the God
remains. But that is only a materialisation of the older truth; for,
according to the truth, heaven is not a faraway place to which people
go. No one _goes_ there; they only open their eyes and see it on every
side around them. For heaven is a state of the psychic life which is
realised in the higher bodies, the bodies of the mental plane, and it
does not need to go hither and thither, North, South, East, or West,
to find it; for, as the great Teacher said: "Behold, the Kingdom of
Heaven is within you"--not far away, beyond the sun or moon or stars.
And the ascension of Jesus to heaven, as the Church of England puts
it--in words that sound very strange in modern ears, because they have
lost their mystic meaning and are only taken in what S. Paul used to
call the "carnal" interpretation--in the fourth article of the Church
of England, was that He ascended into heaven, taking with Him His
"flesh, bones, and all things appertaining to the perfection of man's
nature." Now when you take that in the literal and crude
signification, naturally the thoughtful man revolts against it. What
is this about a physical body and physical bones going up through the
air into the sky? And where has it gone to? The modern man cannot
believe it in that sense, and so he loses the spiritual verity
enshrined in words of symbolism and of allegory. For the fact that
Jesus the Master went away, but still dwells on earth in the flesh,
that is the truth which the article tries to indicate; and not that He
is gone far a