| The first excerpt represents the past or something you must release, and is drawn from God The Invisible King by H. G. Wells: save it from a reductio ad absurdam. The entire history of the
growth of the Christian doctrine in those disordered early centuries
is a history of theology by committee; a history of furious
wrangling, of hasty compromises, and still more hasty attempts to
clinch matters by anathema. When the muddle was at its very worst,
the church was confronted by enormous political opportunities. In
order that it should seize these one chief thing appeared
imperative: doctrinal uniformity. The emperor himself, albeit
unbaptised and very ignorant of Greek, came and seated himself in
the midst of Christian thought upon a golden throne. At the end of
it all Eusebius, that supreme Trimmer, was prepared to damn
|
The second excerpt represents the present or the deciding factor of the moment, and is drawn from Dream Life and Real Life by Olive Schreiner: way, she went back, and took a sharp stone, and cut at the root of a
kippersol, and got out a large piece, as long as her arm, and sat to chew
it. Two conies came out on the rock above her head and peeped at her. She
held them out a piece, but they did not want it, and ran away.
It was very delicious to her. Kippersol is like raw quince, when it is
very green; but she liked it. When good food is thrown at you by other
people, strange to say, it is very bitter; but whatever you find yourself
is sweet!
When she had finished she dug out another piece, and went to look for a
pantry to put it in. At the top of a heap of rocks up which she clambered
she found that some large stones stood apart but met at the top, making a
|
The third excerpt represents the future or something you must embrace, and is drawn from Collected Articles by Frederick Douglass: to enlighten me concerning Northern society. I had been taught
that slavery was the bottom fact of all wealth. With this foundation idea,
I came naturally to the conclusion that poverty must be the general
condition of the people of the free States. In the country from which I came,
a white man holding no slaves was usually an ignorant and poverty-stricken man,
and men of this class were contemptuously called "poor white trash."
Hence I supposed that, since the non-slave-holders at the South were ignorant,
poor, and degraded as a class, the non-slave-holders at the North must be
in a similar condition. I could have landed in no part of the United States
where I should have found a more striking and gratifying contrast,
not only to life generally in the South, but in the condition of the colored
|
