ok him again, and
permanently, into favor: took the poet, but not the Messenger
and his message. For she had gone on the wrong road in spite of
him: she had let the divine force, the influx of the human
spirit which had come to her as her priceless cyclic opportunity,
flow down from the high planes proper to it, on to the plane of
imperialism and vulgar ambition; and his word had been spoken to
the Greeks in vain--as all Greek history and Karma since has been
proclaiming. But in sooth he was not merely for an age, but for
all time; and his message, unlike Pindar's whom all Greece
worshiped, and far more than Homer's or that of Sophocles--is
vital today. Aeschylus, and Plato, and Socrates who speaks
through Plato, and Pythagoras who speaks through all of them, are
the Greeks whose voices are lifted forever for the Soul.

Even the political aspect of his message--the only one I have
touched on--is vital. It proclaims a truth that underlies all
history: one, I suspect, that remains for our Theosophical
Movement to impress on the general world-consciousness so that
wars may end: namely, that the impulse of Nationalism is a holy
thing, foundationed upon the human spirit: a means designed by
the Law for humanity's salvation. But like all spiritual forces,
it must be kept pure and spiritual, or instead of saving, it will
damn. In its inception, it is vision of the Soul: of the Racial
or National Soul--which is a divine light to lure us away from
the plane of personality, to obliterate our distressing and
private moods; to evoke the divine actor in us, and merge us in
a consciousness vastly greater than out own. But add to that
saving truth this damning corolary: _I am better than thou; my
race than thine; we have harvests to reap at your expense, and
our rights may be your wrongs:_--and you have, though it appear
not for awhile, fouled that stream from godhood:--you have
debased your nationalism and made it hellish. Upon your ambitions
and your strength, now in the time of your national flowering,
you may win to your desire, if you _will;_ because now the
spirit is quickening the whole fiber of your national self; and
the national will must become, under that pressure, almost
irresistibly victorious. The Peoples of the earth shall kneel
before your throne; you shall get your vulgar empire;--but you
shall get it presently, as they say, "where the chicken got the
axe": _Vengeance is mine, saith the Law; I will