| The first excerpt represents the past or something you must release, and is drawn from Pagan and Christian Creeds by Edward Carpenter: to such a fate was certainly no better than the Mexican Idol.
And yet Augustine was a great and noble man, with some
by no means unworthy conceptions of the greatness of
his God. In the same way the Aztecs were in many
respects a refined and artistic people, and their religion was
not all superstition and bloodshed. Prescott says of
them[1] that they believed in a supreme Creator and Lord
"omnipresent, knowing all thoughts, giving all gifts, without
whom Man is as nothing--invisible, incorporeal, one God,
of perfect perfection and purity, under whose wings we
find repose and a sure defence." How can we reconcile
Pagan and Christian Creeds |
The second excerpt represents the present or the deciding factor of the moment, and is drawn from The Muse of the Department by Honore de Balzac: loved Dinah too sincerely to regard her degradation as a means of
triumph one day; he was all pity and devotion; he really loved her.
The care and nursing of the infant, its cries, the quiet needed for
the mother during the first few days, and the ubiquity of Madame
Piedefer, were so entirely adverse to literary labors, that Lousteau
moved up to the three rooms taken on the first floor for the old
bigot. The journalist, obliged to go to the first performances without
Dinah, and living apart from her, found an indescribable charm in the
use of his liberty. More than once he submitted to be taken by the arm
and dragged off to some jollification; more than once he found himself
at the house of a friend's mistress in the heart of bohemia. He again
The Muse of the Department |
The third excerpt represents the future or something you must embrace, and is drawn from Crito by Plato: CRITO: No, I came some time ago.
SOCRATES: Then why did you sit and say nothing, instead of at once
awakening me?
CRITO: I should not have liked myself, Socrates, to be in such great
trouble and unrest as you are--indeed I should not: I have been watching
with amazement your peaceful slumbers; and for that reason I did not awake
you, because I wished to minimize the pain. I have always thought you to
be of a happy disposition; but never did I see anything like the easy,
tranquil manner in which you bear this calamity.
SOCRATES: Why, Crito, when a man has reached my age he ought not to be
repining at the approach of death.
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