| The first excerpt represents the past or something you must release, and is drawn from A treatise on Good Works by Dr. Martin Luther: that they may learn to despise temporal things, to bear
misfortune calmly, and not to fear death nor to love this life.
See, what great lessons are these, how many good works you have
before you in your home, with your child, that needs all these
things like a hungry, thirsty, naked, poor, imprisoned, sick
soul. O what a blessed marriage and home were that where such
parents were to be found! Truly it would be a real Church, a
chosen cloister, yea, a paradise. Of such says Psalm cxxviii:
"Blessed are they that fear God, and walk in His Commandments;
thou shalt eat of the labor of thine hands; therefore thou shalt
be happy, and it shall be well with thee. Thy wife shall be as
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The second excerpt represents the present or the deciding factor of the moment, and is drawn from The Deserted Woman by Honore de Balzac: unawares, or perhaps it was curiosity, or a craving for some interest
in his life, or, in a word, that crowd of inexplicable impulses which,
for want of a better name, we are wont to call "fatality," that drew
him to Mme. de Beauseant.
The figure of the Vicomtesse de Beauseant rose up suddenly before him
with gracious thronging associations. She was a new world for him, a
world of fears and hopes, a world to fight for and to conquer.
Inevitably he felt the contrast between this vision and the human
beings in the shabby room; and then, in truth, she was a woman; what
woman had he seen so far in this dull, little world, where calculation
replaced thought and feeling, where courtesy was a cut-and-dried
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The third excerpt represents the future or something you must embrace, and is drawn from The Man in Lower Ten by Mary Roberts Rinehart: McKnight at Richmond, visiting the lady with the geographical name.
And then, for the first time, I associated John Gilmore's granddaughter
with the "West" that McKnight had irritably flung at me.
I still carried my traveling-bag, for McKnight's vision at the window
of the empty house had not been without effect. I did not transfer
the notes to my pocket, and, if I had, it would not have altered the
situation later. Only the other day McKnight put this very thing up
to me.
"I warned you," he reminded me. "I told you there were queer things
coming, and to be on your guard. You ought to have taken your
revolver."
The Man in Lower Ten |
