cause the One who undertakes this
tremendous task cannot tell how the impulse will flow in all its
details, cannot even estimate the amount of difficulty, of delay, nay,
of mischief, that may grow out of the impulse that He has given. In
the first place, He Himself is limited by these bodies that He has
assumed. He cannot use the whole of His vast consciousness within the
limitations of a physical brain and a physical body. Thus, although He
has unified His bodies and is able, so to speak, to run up and down
the ladder of the planes as He will, He is still largely limited in
His activities where He is working in the unplastic matter of the
physical plane; and so, when He undertakes a work like this, He
generates causes whose effects He cannot thoroughly calculate, He
takes the risk which surrounds every great undertaking, He submits
Himself to the conditions of this task upon which He enters, and He is
obliged, having once taken it, to bear it until success or failure has
crowned the effort that He makes.

Those of you who have carefully thought on these subjects will realise
that while the knowledge of a Master is, as regards you or me,
practical omniscience, it is by no means omniscience on His own plane,
relative to the problems with which He has to deal and which He has to
solve. A Master amongst Masters, a Master within the Great White
Lodge, He is amongst His peers, in the presence of His Superiors, and
the problems with which that Lodge has to deal, the questions on which
that Lodge has to decide, are, if I may use the phrase, as difficult
and as puzzling on that plane of being as the problems that we have to
decide down here are on our plane. Hence the possibility of
miscalculation, the possibility of error, the possibility of mistake;
and you can well understand that these beings are subject to such
limitations when you remember the startling assertion that even the
Lord Buddha Himself, high above the Masters, that even He
committed an error in His work on the physical plane. When, then, a
Master volunteers to serve as what may literally be called the
scapegoat of a new spiritual movement, He takes up a karma whose whole
course He is unable to see. And it need not, therefore, be a matter of
surprise that when the time was approaching when another great
spiritual impulse might again be given, according to cyclic law, when
the two who volunteered to undertake the task, to make the sacrifice,
offered Themselves i