meager or Puritan spirit, strives to shut out their divine sister from his needs and aspirations!—­But there, in our hideous modern conditions, there is no vision, without or within; so men go mad with fearful lusts and despairs; and it is the van of the Battle, in one sense, between Godhood and Chaos; and reeks with the slaughter and bloodshed and the madness of that conflict; there too the Holy Spirit of Man is incarnate; there the Host of Souls;—­but in the shock and din and the carnage, there on the slippery brink of yet unconquered hell,—­all the divine descent and ancient glory of the Host is forgotten:—­there is no Vision, and the people perish.

(It may seem I go a long way round to come to him; but in reality I am already trying to draw you a character-sketch of the subject of this evening’s lecture:  to present you the permanent part and significance of a strange incarnation of Vision that appeared in Rome’s dark and dying days:  the man to whom Saint Gregory Nazianzen, in his grand attack, applied that ringing triplet of epithets I have taken for the title of the lecture:  “The Dragon, the Apostate, the Great Mind.”  Know him first in his impersonality thus:  a great white flame of Vision; a tremendous Poet of the Gods in action;—­and then, when you come to his personality, with what it might have retained of personality, of hereditary impairments, perhaps, that should have vanished had he lived past his young manhood, these will not hinder you from understanding the greatness and beauty and tragedy of that life apparently wasted.  But we shall come to him in our time.)

Back in the sixth century B. C., when all those Great Teachers came:  when the forces that until then had been pent up in the Mysteries were suddenly let loose upon the world,—­and the more vehement for their having been so pent up, and their now being so let loose;—­what a flood of vision they brought with them!  In Greece, to rouse up almost at once that wonderful wave of artistic creation; in Persia, to create quickly a splendid and chivalrous empire; in India, (so far as we know) to pervade as an ethical illumination the life of the people for some centuries before manifesting in art or empire; in China, to work in a twofold current, on one side upon the imagination, on the other upon the moral conceptions of the race, until the Chinese manvantara began.  Its effect in each case was according to the cyclic position of the country at the time:  those, seemingly, being the most fortunate, that had to wait longest for the full fruition.  Thus it struck China in the midst of pralaya, and lay in the soil fructifying until the pralaya had passed; then, appearing and re-appearing according to cyclic law, was a saving health in the nation for fifteen centuries at least;—­India, I imagine, when the manvantara there some five centuries old, and under a minor shadow; which shadow once passed, it produced its splendors in the Maurya time; and was