In those days when many knew, when many understood, a distinction was drawn between Jesus and Christ. I alluded to it, you remember, in the first of this course of lectures; and I did so deliberately, intending to return to it when, having dealt with the many intermediate questions, I should arrive at the lecture on the Coming Christ. For there was a difference between the human body of the mighty disciple Jesus, born in Bethlehem, and the divine Power that came down upon that body at the point of time marked as the Baptism, when it is written, the Spirit of God came down upon Him and abode with Him; there you have marked the Coming of the Christ, the consecration of the Supreme Teacher. That distinction you find recognised in the Epistles, though no attention is drawn to it further in the Gospels after that startling and suggestive statement; but if you take the Pauline epistles you find yourself in quite a different atmosphere from that of the history as told in the Gospels; you find there the name of Christ in a new meaning, a mystical meaning of profoundest import; you find S. Paul declaring that he does not ask to know Him after the flesh, it is the inner Christ he seeks; you find him saying of that mystic Christ that He has to be born in the believer—a statement that could never have been made of the physical body of Jesus. You find him declaring that that mystic birth of the Christ in human souls is to be followed by a growth of the mystic Christ within the believer, until at last he has reached the measure of the stature of the fulness of the Christ. That is the mystic Christian life, the Christ born in the soul, unfolding His divine powers as the Christian grows in wisdom and in love, showing Himself more and more manifest as the human life unfolds to the divine, until the perfect Christ is manifest and the Son of God is seen again on earth. But that old mystical idea slipped out of the Church teachings, and only remained in the Testament, marked but not understood. And so He who was the inspiring Spirit, the Supreme Teacher, the all-pervading life of His Church, became the outside Saviour, who by a physical sacrifice was said to have made atonement between God and man; and you had a vicarious atonement, a legal substitution, instead of that identity of nature which made the Christ and the believer one. That is the change which came over Christian teaching in those long ages of darkness that followed the vanishing of the Mysteries that had kept the flame of knowledge alive, until there were no longer pupils willing to be taught, and by the absence of the pupils the teachings of the Masters were withdrawn.