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 lit