means of arriving at
truth; the Christian community itself propagates the truth. To the
confidence in the mystical forces which spring up in the inmost being
of man, during initiation, was added the confidence in the One,
primordial Initiator.

The Mystics sought to become divine, they wished to experience
divinity. Jesus was divine, we must hold fast to Him, and then we
shall become partakers of His divinity, in the community founded by
Him; this became Christian conviction. What became divine in Jesus was
made so for all His followers. "Lo, I am with you alway, even unto the
end of the world." The one who was born in Bethlehem has an eternal
character independent of time. The Christmas anthem thus speaks of the
birth of Jesus, as if it took place each Christmas, "Christ is born
to-day, the Saviour has come into the world to-day, to-day the angels
are singing on earth."

In the Christ-experience is to be seen a definite stage of initiation.
When the Mystic of pre-Christian times passed through this
Christ-experience, he was, through his initiation, in a state which
enabled him to perceive something spiritually,--in higher worlds,--to
which no fact in the world of sense corresponded. He experienced that
which surrounds the Mystery of Golgotha in the higher world. If the
Christian Mystic goes through this experience by initiation, he at the
same time beholds the historical event which took place on Golgotha,
and knows that in that event, enacted within the physical world, there
is the same content as was formerly only in the supersensible facts of
the Mysteries. Thus there was poured out on the Christian community,
through the "Mysteries of Golgotha," that which formerly had been
poured out on the Mystics within the temples. And initiation gives
Christian Mystics the possibility of becoming conscious of what is
contained in the "Mystery of Golgotha," whereas faith makes man an
unconscious partaker of the mystical stream which flowed from the
events depicted in the New Testament, and which has ever since been
pervading the spiritual life of humanity.

FOOTNOTES:

[4] The great initiates raised themselves through initiation up into
the sphere of the Logos and carried this Logos influence with them in
their human life. The fundamental difference between them and Jesus was
the fact that the Logos in the course of its evolution individualised
itself into One Divine Individuality who descended into Jesus of
Nazareth a