GREEKS AND PERSIANS

When Deborah sings of that treacherous murderess, Jael the wife
of Heber the Kenite, that before she slew her guest and ally
Sisera, "He asked water and she gave him milk; she brought
forth butter in a lordly dish,"--you are aware that, to the
singer, no question of ethics was implied. Nothing common,
nothing of this human daily world, inheres in it; but sacrosanct
destinies were involved, and the martialed might of the Invisible.
It was part of a tremendous drama, in which Omnipotence itself
was protagonist. Little Israel rose against the mighty of
this world; but the Unseen is mightier than the mighty; and
the Unseen was with little Israel. The application is false,
unethical, abominable--as coming through brain-minds of that
kind. But you must go back behind the application, behind
the brain-mind, to find the secret of the air of greatness that
pervades it. It is a far-off reflection of this eternal truth:
that the Soul, thought it speak through but one human being, can
turn the destinies and overturn the arrogance of the world. When
David sang, "Let God arise, and let his enemies be scattered;
yea, let all his enemies be scattered!" he, poor brain-mind, was
thinking of his triumphs over Philistines and the like; with
whom he had better have been finding a way to peace;--but the
Soul behind him was thinking of its victories over him and his
passions and his treacheries. So such psalms and stories,
though their substance be vile enough, do by their language
yet remind us somehow of the grandeur of the Spirit. That
is what style achieves.

Undoubtedly this grand language of the Bible, as that of Milton
and Shakespeare in a lesser degree--lesser in proportion as they
have been less read--has fed in the English race an aptitude, an
instinct, for action on a large imperial scale. It is not easy
to explain the effect of great literature; but without doubt it
molds the race. Now the ethic of the Old Testament, its moral
import, is very mixed. There is much that is true and beautiful;
much that is treacherous and savage. So that its moral and
ethical effects have been very mixed too. But its style, a
subtler thing than ethics, has nourished conceptions of a large
and seeping sort, to play through what ethical ideas they might
find. The more spiritual is any influence--that is, the less
visible and easy to trace--the more potent it is; so style in
literature may be counted one of the most potent forces of all.
Through it, great creative minds mold the destinies of nations.
Let Theosophy have expression as noble as that of the Bible--as
it will--and of that very impulse it will bite deep into the
subconsciousness of the race, and be the nourishment of grand
public action, immense conceptions, greater than any that have
come of Bible reading, because pure and true. Our work is to
purify the channels through which the Soul shall speak; the
Teachers have devoted themselves to establishing the beginnings
of this Movement in right thought and right life. But the great
literary impulse will come, when we have learned and earned the
right to use it.

Now, what the Bible became to the English, Homer became to the
Greeks--and more also. They heard his grand manner, and were
billed by it with echoes from the Supermundane. _Anax andron
Agamemnon_--what Greek could hear a man so spoken of, and dream
he compounded of common clay? Never mind what this king of men
did or failed to do; do but breathe his name and titles, and you
have affirmed immortality and the splendor of the Human Soul!
The _human_ Soul?

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