celestials, and

Very early, very early, Christ was born.

As the great legend of the Sun gathered round Him, the sign of the Lamb
became that of His crucifixion as the sign of the Virgin had become that
of His birth. We have seen that the Bull was sacred to Mithras and the
Fish to Oannes, and that the Lamb was sacred to Christ, and for the same
reason; it was the sign of the spring equinox, at the period of history
in which He crossed the great circle of the horizon, was "crucified in
space."

These Sun myths, ever recurring throughout the ages, with a different
name for their Hero in each new recension, cannot pass unrecognised by
the student, though they may naturally and rightly be ignored by the
devotee; and when they are used as a weapon to mutilate or destroy the
majestic figure of the Christ, they must be met, not by denying the
facts, but by understanding the deeper meaning of the stories, the
spiritual truths that the legends expressed under a veil.

Why have these legends mingled with the history of Jesus, and
crystallised round Him, as a historical personage? These are really the
stories not of a particular individual named Jesus but of the universal
Christ; of a Man who symbolised a Divine Being, and who represented a
fundamental truth in nature; a Man who filled a certain office and held
a certain characteristic position towards humanity; standing towards
humanity in a special relationship, renewed age after age, as generation
succeeded generation, as race gave way to race. Hence He was, as are all
such, the "Son of Man," a peculiar and distinctive title, the title of
an office, not of an individual. The Christ of the Solar Myth was the
Christ of the Mysteries, and we find the secret of the mythic in the
mystic Christ.

CHAPTER VI.

THE MYSTIC CHRIST.

We now approach that deeper side of the Christ story that gives it its
real hold upon the hearts of men. We approach that perennial life which
bubbles up from an unseen source, and so baptises its representative
with its lucent flood that human hearts cling round the Christ, and feel
that they could almost more readily reject the apparent facts of history
than deny that which they intuitively feel to be a vital, an essential
truth of the higher life. We draw near the sacred portal of the
Mysteries, and lift a corner of the veil that hides the sanctuary.

We have seen that, go back as far as we may into antiquity, we find
everywhere recogni