" certain
metaphysical writers and accredited teachers have undertaken to determine
essential meanings and interpretations, and to submit religious
revelations, creeds, dogmas, and theologies to critical analysis.

How far this analysis has gone, and how little of the original
interpretation actually remains, only they are aware who keep abreast of
current thought, and who with open mind care more for the simple truth
than for custom, tradition, theologies, and the folklore of the past.

Dogmatic theological authority is completely undermined, and its days are
numbered.[1]

With the masses there is the habitual unrest, the feeling of uncertainty,
the social upheaval, with the inevitable tendency to confusion and
anarchy. A new religion is already in the formative stage, a new Avatar
inevitable.

It is to be less a repudiation than a revision and rehabilitation of the
old religion.

People everywhere are looking for the new revelation, for the coming of
_Christos_, for the new Avatar, and few are aware that he is already
here.

It should be borne strictly in mind that in every instance in the past,
the advent of the Avatar has been unattended by signs and wonders, has
come upon the stage of human action in the most commonplace way, and that
myth, miracle, and folklore have followed as time went on.

To the people of his time Jesus was the "son of the carpenter," whose
family was obscure. He came "eating with publicans and sinners."

Jesus, the demigod of to-day, was unknown and undreamed of in Galilee.
Philo Judaeus seems never to have heard of him.

What and who Jesus was, and what he did, is separated from what the church
and theologians have made of him by a gulf that seems almost impassable,
and yet this gulf has already been bridged and passed.

The new Avatar has for its mission the rehabilitation of Jesus as he
actually existed, divested of all myth and miracle, while the mission for
which he came, and the doctrines for which he lived and died are to be
completely restored to mankind in their purity.

The old Hindoos would call this transformation a "reincarnation of
Vishnu," a "new Avatar."

It will mean Jesus the divine Man, the master, _Christos_, restored to the
heart of Humanity from the mysticism and miracle of monks and theologies,
from the superstitions and folklore of the multitude.

This means a reconstruction and a restatement of the religion of Jesus.

Jesus remaining what he actually