III. The Entrance of the Christ-Being into the Evolution of Humanity

Now if we look back to the pre-Christian time, we must say that when the impulse enabling man to distinguish between good and evil was not yet present, such distinction, and the judgment of man as to the good, the beautiful and the true, was necessarily meagre; it did not actually proceed from his inner being. He could not, before the Christ-Impulse, have distinguished in his inner being between good and evil. In the pre-Christian time the decision as to the really Good, Beautiful and True could only be accomplished through certain beings—such as the Bodhisattvas—reaching up as time went on with a part of their being into the divine-spiritual worlds; the distinction between good and evil was therefore not made from out of man's inner being, but in the divine worlds. Through their companionship with divine spiritual beings these Guides acquired it and it flowed from them into the souls of men, as though by suggestion. Had it not been for those guides, men could only have made feeble distinctions between good and evil in those days. If these guides had depended on their own hearts alone, they could not have done this either; but because they descended into those depths of the soul which were not yet accessible to man and entered in their ego-being into the kingdoms of heaven, they received the impulse needed by man to help him to decide between good and evil at the time of his need, that the good might nevertheless be implanted in the earth by way of preparation. Thus, before the time of Christ, man was a being still insufficiently prepared to acquire the likeness to God. On this account, since the Lemurian epoch, everything done by man was done less well than would otherwise have been the case. This applies above all to what regards himself. His astral, etheric and physical bodies, which but for the luciferic influence would have remained more spiritual, were, through that influence, less well formed, made more material. That was the reason of all the evil which developed in the life of man as time went on. In the course of a very long time have these evils developed.