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?

“Tush!” said they, “the Greek Soul! he was a Greek as we are!"....  And so Tomides, Dickaion and Harryotatos, Athenian tinkers and cobblers, go swaggering back to their shops, and dream grand racial dreams.  For this is a much more impressionable people than the English; any wind from the Spirit blows in upon their minds quickly and easily.  Homer in Greece —­once Solon, or Pisistratus, or Hopparchus, had edited and canonized him, and arranged for his orderly periodical public reading (as the Bible in the churches)—­had an advantage even over the Bible in England.  When Cromwell and his men grew mighty upon the deeds of the mighty men of Israel, they had to thrill to the grand rhythms until a sort of miracle had been accomplished, and they had come to see in themselves the successors and living representatives of Israel.  But the Greek, rising on the swell of Homer’s roll and boom, had need of no such transformation.  The uplift was all for him; his by hereditary right; and no pilfering necessary, from alien creed or race.  We have seen in Homer an inspired Race-patriot, a mighty poet saddened and embittered by the conditions he saw and his own impotence to change them.—­Yes, he had heard the golden-snooded sing; but Greeks were pygmies, compared with the giants who fought at Ilion!  There was that eternal contrast between the glory he had within and the squalor he saw without.  Yes, he could sing; he could launch great songs for love of the ancients and their magnificence.  But what could a song do?  Had it feet to travel Hellas; hands to flash a sword for her; a voice and kingly authority to command her sons into redemption?—­Ah, poor blind old begging minstrel, it had vastly greater powers and organs than these!