| The first excerpt represents the past or something you must release, and is drawn from Sons of the Soil by Honore de Balzac: him, and spoke to him courteously and without heat. As a general thing
all men who belong to the Church, or who have come out of it, have the
patience of insects; they owe this to the obligation they have been
under, ecclesiastically, to preserve decorum,--a training which has
been lacking for the last twenty years to the vast majority of the
French nation, even those who think themselves well-bred. All the
monks which the Revolution brought out of their monasteries and forced
into business, public or private, showed in their coldness and reserve
the great advantage which ecclesiastical discipline gives to the sons
of the Church, even those who desert her.
Gaubertin had understood Rigou from the days when the Abbe Niseron
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The second excerpt represents the present or the deciding factor of the moment, and is drawn from The Oakdale Affair by Edgar Rice Burroughs: room here where we can lay the girl."
The boy fumbled gropingly in search of the matches.
It was evident to the man that it was only with the
greatest exertion of will power that he controlled his
muscles at all; but at last he succeeded in finding and
striking one. At the flare of the light there was a sound
from below--a scratching sound and the creaking of
boards as beneath a heavy body; then came the clank-
ing of the chain once more, and the bannister against
which they leaned shook as though a hand had been
laid upon it below them. The youth stifled a shriek and
The Oakdale Affair |
The third excerpt represents the future or something you must embrace, and is drawn from The Soul of Man by Oscar Wilde: slaves, nor had anything to do with the question really. It was,
undoubtedly, the Abolitionists who set the torch alight, who began
the whole thing. And it is curious to note that from the slaves
themselves they received, not merely very little assistance, but
hardly any sympathy even; and when at the close of the war the
slaves found themselves free, found themselves indeed so absolutely
free that they were free to starve, many of them bitterly regretted
the new state of things. To the thinker, the most tragic fact in
the whole of the French Revolution is not that Marie Antoinette was
killed for being a queen, but that the starved peasant of the
Vendee voluntarily went out to die for the hideous cause of
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