Greek history is merely a phase of human history.  We have looked for its significance exclusively in political and cultural regions; but this is altogether a mistake.  The Greeks did not invent culture; there had been greater cultures before, only they are forgotten.  All that about the “evolution of Political freedom,” of the city state, republicanism, etc., is just nonsense.  As far as I can see, the importance of Greece lies in this:  human history, the main part of 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 about the future—­even the near future;—­except