f it, flowing in that age
through the narrow channel of Greece, came down from sacred to
secular; from the last remnants of a state of affairs in which
the Lodge, through the Mysteries, had controlled life and
events, to the beginnings of one in which things were to muddle
through under the sweet guidance of brain-minds and ordinary men.
The old order had become impossible; the world had drifted too
far from the Gods. So the Gods tried a new method: let loose a
new great force in the world; sent Teachers to preach openly
(sow broadcast, and let the seed take its chances) what had
before been concealed and revealed systematically within the
Established Mysteries. What Athens did with that new force has
affected the whole history of Europe since; apparently mostly
for weal; really, nearly altogether for woe.

Aristides, with convincing logic, had been able to persuade all
Greece to act against a common danger under an Athens then
morally great, and feeling this new force from the God-world
as a wine in the air, a mental ozone, an inspiration from the
subliminal to heroic endeavor. But his policy perished when the
visible need for it subsided; it gave way to the Themistoclean,
which passed into the Periclean policy; and that, says Mahaffy,
"was so dangerous and difficult that no cautious and provident
thinker could have called it secure." Which also was Plato's view
of it; who went so far as to say that Pericles had made the
Athenians lazy, sensual, and frivolous. When we find Aeschylus at
the start at odds with it, and Plato at the end condemning it
wholesale,--for my part I think we hardly need bother to argue
about it further. Both were men who saw from a standpoint above
the enlightenment of the common brain-mind.

It is not the present purpose to treat history as a matter of
wars and politics; details of which you can get from any
textbook; our concern is with the motions of the human spirit,
and the laws that work from behind. As to these motions, and the
grand influxes, there is this much we can rely on: they come by
law, in their regular cycles; and we can invite their coming,
and insure their stability when they do come. The more I study
history, the more the significance of my present surroundings
impresses me. We stand here upon a marvelous isthmus in time;
behind us lies a world of dreary commonplaces called the
civilization of Christendom; before us--who knows what possibilities?
Nothing is certain