other book whatsoever; more common quotations come from it,
probably, than from all other sources combined. The Puritans
of old, like the Nonconformists now, completely identified
themselves with the folk it tells about: Cromwell's armies saw
in the hands of their great captain "the sword of the Lord and of
Gideon." When the Roundhead went into battle, or when the
Revivalist goes to prayer meeting, he heard and hears the command
of Jehovah to "go up to Ramoth Gilead and prosper"; to "smite
Amalek hip and thigh." Phrases from the Old Testament are in the
mouths of millions daily; and they are phrases couched in the
grand literary style.

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