How shall we recognize him? How shall we be sure that the one we see is indeed the Christ? There are many men in the world today who are giving very sound instruction, very beautiful teachings, and some of them are claimed to be the Christ by their followers. We know there are, today, many people who claim to be the Christ or Maitreya; and we know, too, that there is a prophecy which says that before the Christ comes there will be many false Christs, false teachings about the Christ, and that: “if someone points to a man and says, ‘that is the Christ, lo, here! or lo, there!’ do not believe him.”

No one will point to the true Christ and say: “That is the Christ.” The recognition of the Christ is up to each one of us, individually. The Christ is the Embodiment of the energy we call the Christ Consciousness or Christ Principle, the energy of the Cosmic Christ. It is released into the world for us by Maitreya, the Christ, and to the degree that it manifests in us, we will recognize him.

He will show that our political and economic life has to make a complete change of direction and become the spiritual activity which essentially it is; that our educational systems, our science and culture, should, again, take on a new, spiritual, connotation. He will speak across the whole range of human activity, and it will be by the breadth of his teaching, the universality of his viewpoint, that we may recognize him; by his tremendous spiritual potency, his extraordinary aura of purity, sanctity; by his obvious love and capacity to serve; by all of these we may recognize him.

Many people will follow the Christ without recognizing him, without even knowing he is in the world. But they will follow that man because they believe in what he is saying, in what he stands for: sharing and brotherhood, justice and freedom for all mankind. He will be the spokesman for a certain type of group thinking along these lines. Not the Preacher of old. He has said that many will be perhaps surprised at his appearance. He comes, not as the Head of the Christian, or any other church, for that matter. It may be that the orthodox Christian leaders will be among the last to recognize the Christ. He is not the one and only Son of God, but the friend and Elder Brother of Humanity.

The radio and television networks of the world will be linked up, and he will make his appeal, his call, to mankind. By mentally overshadowing all mankind simultaneously, he will come into telepathic rapport with all humanity everywhere, and we shall hear his words silently entering our minds, in our own language. We in the United Kingdom shall hear him in English, the French in French, the Russians in Russian, and so on. It is in this way that we shall know that he is truly the Christ. Thus will be repeated, only now on a world scale, what happened at Pentecost; and in celebration of this event, Pentecost will become one of the major festivals of the new world religion which the Christ will eventually inaugurate. Our response to his call will determine the future of the world.