Lecture V

“The Law was given by Moses, but grace and truth came by Jesus Christ.” If we thoroughly understand this passage we shall also understand that deeply significant event in the history of humanity which took place through the appearance of Christ on the Earth. In the earlier lectures of this course we have traced the evolution of humanity in broad outlines, and we have described the way in which the consciousness of the Ego developed in the distant past whole groups and generations of human beings had one Ego in common. From this we learned to understand the long age of the patriarchs. Gradually this feeling of the Ego became limited more and more to the single personalities. We also showed how two spiritual streams made themselves felt in this evolution: the one was the stream of blood-relationship, which endeavoured to hold men together by natural ties, and the other, the Luciferic, which made men independent and prepared them for the purely spiritual tie which was to come.