esus
awakens the Universal Spirit once more, but in a human form, in
present existence. Such an event had formerly taken place at the
higher stages of initiation. Those initiated in the spirit of the
Osiris myth attained to such a resurrection. In the life of Jesus,
this "great" initiation was added to the Buddha initiation. Buddha
demonstrated by his life that man is the Logos, and that he returns to
the Logos, to the light, when his earthly part dies. In Jesus, the
Logos himself became a person. In him, the Word was made flesh.

Therefore, what was enacted in the innermost recesses of the temples
by the guardians of the ancient Mysteries has been apprehended,
through Christianity, as a historical fact. The followers of Christ
Jesus confessed their belief in Him, the initiate, of unique and
supreme greatness. He proved to them that the world is divine. In the
Christian community, the wisdom of the Mysteries was indissolubly
bound up with the personality of Christ Jesus. That which man
previously had sought to attain through the Mysteries was now replaced
by the belief that Christ had lived on earth, and that the faithful
belonged to him.

Henceforward, part of what was formerly only to be gained through
mystical methods, could be replaced, in the Christian community, by
the conviction that the divine had been manifested in the Word present
amongst them. Not that for which each individual soul underwent a long
preparation was now decisive, but what those had heard and seen who
were with Jesus, and what was handed down by them. "That which was
from the beginning, which we have heard, which ... our hands have
handled, of the Word of life ... that which we have seen and heard
declare we unto you, that ye also may have fellowship with us." Thus
do we read in the first Epistle of St. John. And this immediate
reality is to embrace all future generations in a living bond of
union, and as a church is mystically to extend from race to race. It
is in this sense that the words of St. Augustine are to be understood,
"I should not believe the Gospels unless the authority of the Catholic
Church induced me to do so." Thus the Gospels do not contain within
themselves testimony to their truth, but they are to be believed
because they are founded on the personality of Jesus, and because the
Church from that personality mysteriously draws the power to make the
truth of the Gospels manifest.

The Mysteries handed down traditionally the