evere character. The Essene and Therapeutic
communities form a natural transition from the Mysteries to
Christianity. But Christianity wished to extend to humanity in general
what with the Essenes and Therapeutae was an affair of a sect. This of
course prepared the way for a still further weakening of the old
severe forms.

The existence of such sects makes it possible to understand how far
the time was ripe for the comprehension of the mystery of Christ. In
the Mysteries, a man was artificially prepared for the dawning upon
his consciousness, at the appropriate time, of the spiritual world.
Within the Essene or Therapeutic community the soul sought, by a
certain mode of life, to become ripe for the awakening of the higher
man. A further step forward is that man struggles through to a feeling
that a human individuality may have evolved to higher and higher
stages of perfection in repeated earth lives. One who had arrived at a
glimpse of this truth would also be able to feel that in Jesus a being
of lofty spirituality had appeared. The loftier the spirituality, the
greater the possibility of accomplishing something of importance. Thus
the individuality of Jesus could become capable of accomplishing the
deed which the Evangelists so mysteriously indicate in the Baptism by
John, and which, by the way in which they speak of it, they so clearly
point out as of the utmost importance. The personality of Jesus became
able to receive into its own soul Christ, the Logos, who was made
flesh in that soul. Thenceforward the Ego of Jesus of Nazareth was the
Christ, and the outer personality was the vehicle of the Logos. The
event of the Ego of Jesus becoming the Christ is enacted in the
Baptism by St. John. During the period of the Mysteries, "union with
the Spirit" was only for those who were initiated. Amongst the
Essenes, a whole community cultivated a life by means of which all its
members were able to arrive at the mystical union. In the coming of
Christ, something, _i.e._, the deeds of Christ, was placed before the
whole of humanity, so that all might share in the mystical union.

XI

THE NATURE OF CHRISTIANITY

The deepest effect must have been produced upon believers in
Christianity by the fact that the Divine, the Word, the eternal Logos,
no longer came to them in the dim twilight of the Mysteries, as Spirit
only, but that when they spoke of the Logos, they were made to think
of the historical, human personality