I do not want to repeat what there I said, but I want to recall to your minds the leading principle that the Theosophical Society cannot claim an exclusive right to any special spiritual privilege, that the spiritual privileges that it enjoys are part of the general spiritual heritage of the world, and that you have to consider any special case in relation to those general principles.

So that in thinking of the Masters in relation to our own Society, we must bear in mind how very wide are their relations to all great spiritual movements, to all religions, and that all who are spoken of in the different faiths as Founder or Founders of a particular religion would fall under the name, Master.
Now I was hesitating a moment in completing that sentence, because one almost has to explain that in thus using the word one is including in it a little more than is included under the term in the special significance with which we are going to use it now; for in the case of the religions of the Hindus, the religion of the Buddhists, and the religion of the Christians, when we speak of the Founder of each of these religions, we are speaking of great personages who, in the Occult Hierarchy, are higher than those whom we call Masters: in the case of Hinduism, the Manu, who is the Lord really of the whole of the Fifth Root Race; in the case of Buddhism, the Buddha, who is a teacher of all gods and men before He takes up His place as the illuminated, the supreme Buddha.

And in the case of the Christian Religion also, there is something peculiar in the life of the Founder.
You have there, in the first place, a being whom we call by the name Jesus, in himself a disciple, but living in the world at that time under exceedingly strange and peculiar conditions.

Some of you may have read with some amount of care that section of the third volume of _The Secret Doctrine_ which is called "The Mystery of the Buddha." I am bound to confess that as it stands there it is very confused, partly intentionally, I think, on the part of the writer, but also partly in consequence of the fact mentioned in that volume, that you have there put together a large number of fragments, and they were put together by myself at a time when I knew very much less of the arrangement, so to speak, of those relationships between the higher and lower worlds than I do now.

Hence there is some darkness there that belongs to the subject, and some that belongs to the incompetence of the compiler.