L'amor che muove il sole e le altre stelle,
"The Love that moves the sun and the other Stars." Ah, glory to this Dante! Glory to the man who would end nothing but with the stars!
III. GREEKS AND PERSIANS
Now to consider what this Blind Maeonides did for Greece. Sometime last Century a Black Potentate from Africa visited England, and was duly amazed at all he saw. Being a very important person indeed, he was invited to pay his respects to Queen Victoria. he told her of the many wonders he had seen; and took occasion to ask her, as the supreme authority, how such things came to be. What was the secret of England's greatness? —She rose to it magnificently, and did precisely what a large section of her subjects would have expected of her. She solemnly handed him a copy of the Bible, and told him he should find his answer in that.
She was thinking, no doubt, of the influence of Christian teaching; if called on for the exact passage that had worked the wonder, very likely she would have turned to the Sermon on the Mount. Well; very few empires have founded their material greatness on such texts, as The meek shall inherit the earth. They take a shorter road to it. If a man ask of thee thy coat, and thou give him thy cloak also, thou dost not (generally) build thyself a world-wide commerce. When he smiteth thee on they left cheek, and thou turnest to him thy right for the complementary buffet, thou dost not (as a rule) become shortly possessed of his territories. Queen Victoria lived in an age when people did not notice these little discrepancies; so did Mr. Podsnap. And yet there was much more truth in her answer than you might think.
King James's Bible is a monument of mighty literary style; and one that generations of Englishmen have regarded as divine, a message from the Ruler of the Stars. They have been reading it, and hearing it read in the churches, for three hundred years. Its language has been far more familiar to them than that of any other book whatsoever; more common quotations come from it, probably, than from all other sources combined. The Puritans of old, like the Nonconformists now, completely identified themselves with the folk it tells about: Cromwell's armies saw in the hands of their great captain "the sword of the Lord and of Gideon." When the Roundhead went into battle, or when the Revivalist goes to prayer meeting, he heard and hears the command of Jehovah to "go up to Ramoth Gilead and prosper"; to "smite Amalek hip and thigh." Phrases from the Old Testament are in the mouths of millions daily; and they are phrases couched in the grand literary style.
Now the grand style is the breathing of a sense of greatness. When it occurs you sense a mysterious importance lurking behind the words. It is the accent of the eternal thing in man, the Soul; and one of the many proofs of the Soul's existence. So you cannot help being reminded by it of the greatness of the soul. There are periods when the soul draws near its racial vehicle, and the veils grow thin between it and us: through all the utterances of such times one is apt to hear the thunder from beyond. Although the soul have no word to say, or although it message suffer change in passing through the brain-mind, so that not high truth, but even a lie may emerge—it still comes, often, ringing with the grand accents. Such a period was that which gave us Shakespeare and Milton, and the Bible, and Brown, and Taylor, and all the mighty masters of English prose. Even when their thought is trivial or worse, you are reminded, by the march and mere order of their words, of the majesty of the Soul.
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?