| The first excerpt represents the element of Air. It speaks of mental influences and the process of thought, and is drawn from St. Ives by Robert Louis Stevenson: must not recall these tender and sorrowful memories twice; their
place is further on, and I am now upon another business. The
perfidy of the Britannic Government stood nowhere more openly
confessed than in one particular of our discipline: that we were
shaved twice in the week. To a man who has loved all his life to
be fresh shaven, can a more irritating indignity be devised?
Monday and Thursday were the days. Take the Thursday, and conceive
the picture I must present by Sunday evening! And Saturday, which
was almost as bad, was the great day for visitors.
Those who came to our market were of all qualities, men and women,
the lean and the stout, the plain and the fairly pretty. Sure, if
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The second excerpt represents the element of Fire. It speaks of emotional influences and base passions, and is drawn from Common Sense by Thomas Paine: IS PLEASED TO SET OVER US" - If these are REALLY your principles why
do ye not abide by them? Why do ye not leave that, which ye call
God's Work, to be managed by himself? These very principles instruct
you to wait with patience and humility, for the event of all public measures,
and to receive that event as the divine will towards you. Wherefore,
what occasion is there for your POLITICAL TESTIMONY if you fully believe
what it contains? And the very publishing it proves, that either,
ye do not believe what ye profess, or have not virtue enough to practise
what ye believe.
The principles of Quakerism have a direct tendency to make a man
the quiet and inoffensive subject of any, and every government
Common Sense |
| The third excerpt represents the element of Water. It speaks of pure spiritual influences and feelings of love, and is drawn from Arizona Nights by Stewart Edward White:
"No good," said I. "We've got our work cut out for us as it is."
Denton backed me up. We were both old hands at the business, had
each in our time suffered the "cotton-mouth" thirst, and the
memory of it outweighed any desire for treasure.
But Schwartz was money-mad. Left to himself he would have staid
on that sand flat to perish, as certainly as had poor Billy. We
had fairly to force him away, and then succeeded only because we
let him fill all his pockets to bulging with the coins. As we
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The fourth excerpt represents the element of Earth. It speaks of physical influences and the impact of the unseen on the visible world, and is drawn from Phaedrus by Plato: with the recollection of the true beauty; he would like to fly away, but he
cannot; he is like a bird fluttering and looking upward and careless of the
world below; and he is therefore thought to be mad. And I have shown this
of all inspirations to be the noblest and highest and the offspring of the
highest to him who has or shares in it, and that he who loves the beautiful
is called a lover because he partakes of it. For, as has been already
said, every soul of man has in the way of nature beheld true being; this
was the condition of her passing into the form of man. But all souls do
not easily recall the things of the other world; they may have seen them
for a short time only, or they may have been unfortunate in their earthly
lot, and, having had their hearts turned to unrighteousness through some
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