It may seem a comparatively small thing to start such an impulse, and very vague probably are the ideas of many of you as to what is implied in the statement "bearing the karma," which the generation of the impulse implies.

The great act of sacrifice lies not only in the truth that He is wearing a physical body of coarse matter, which hampers Him from time to time, but that He cannot lay that body aside, once He has used it for giving this great spiritual impulse, until that impulse is entirely exhausted, and the religion, or the association, to which it has given birth has vanished out of the physical world.

Take, for instance, the case of the Master, Jesus: He--by His own voluntary act of course, in the beginning, for it is always a volunteer who comes forward; such a sacrifice cannot be imposed--He, voluntarily, giving up His body, and later taking from the Bodhisattva the guarding of the infant plant of which the Bodhisattva had sown the seed which was to grow into the great tree of Christianity, taking that from Him, He bound Himself by the acceptance of that work to remain in the bonds of the physical body until the Christian Church had completed its work, and until the last Christian had passed away, either into liberation, or re-birth into some other faith.

It is the same with the other great religions, so many of which are now dead--the religion of Egypt, of Chaldea, and many another.

The Masters who had to do with those have long since cast away Their physical bodies, and thereby ceased to be what we call Masters, because the religion that each gave to the world had done its work, and no souls remained who could be further helped by passing through the teaching and the training of that particular religion.