| The first excerpt represents the past or something you must release, and is drawn from The Master of Ballantrae by Robert Louis Stevenson: flung a stone one day at Mr. Henry.
"Whaur's the bonnie lad that trustit ye?" she cried.
Mr. Henry reined in his horse and looked upon her, the blood
flowing from his lip. "Ay, Jess?" says he. "You too? And yet ye
should ken me better." For it was he who had helped her with
money.
The woman had another stone ready, which she made as if she would
cast; and he, to ward himself, threw up the hand that held his
riding-rod.
"What, would ye beat a lassie, ye ugly - ?" cries she, and ran away
screaming as though he had struck her.
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The second excerpt represents the present or the deciding factor of the moment, and is drawn from Royalty Restored/London Under Charles II by J. Fitzgerald Molloy: already St. Paul's Cathedral was doomed to destruction.
Threatened on one side by the flames devastating Cheapside, and
on the other from those creeping steadily up from Blackfriars to
this great centre, it was now impossible to save the venerable
church, which Evelyn terms "one of the most ancient pieces of
early Christian piety in the world." Seen by this fierce light,
and overhung by a crimson sky, every curve of its dark outline,
every stone of its pillars and abutments, every column of its
incomparable portico, stood clearly defined, so that never had it
looked so stately and magnificent, so vast and majestic, as now
when beheld for the last time.
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The third excerpt represents the future or something you must embrace, and is drawn from The Varieties of Religious Experience by William James: imagination, to find in the driftings of the cosmic atoms,
whether they work on the universal or on the particular scale,
anything but a kind of aimless weather, doing and undoing,
achieving no proper history, and leaving no result. Nature has no
one distinguishable ultimate tendency with which it is possible
to feel a sympathy. In the vast rhythm of her processes, as the
scientific mind now follows them, she appears to cancel herself.
The books of natural theology which satisfied the intellects of
our grandfathers seem to us quite grotesque,[334] representing,
as they did, a God who conformed the largest things of nature to
the paltriest of our private wants. The God whom science
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