Now the grand style is the breathing of a sense of greatness.  When it occurs you sense a mysterious importance lurking behind the words.  It is the accent of the eternal thing in man, the Soul; and one of the many proofs of the Soul’s existence.  So you cannot help being reminded by it of the greatness of the soul.  There are periods when the soul draws near its racial vehicle, and the veils grow thin between it and 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 literature; but without doubt it molds the race.  Now the ethic of the Old Testament, its moral import, is very mixed.