Today's Stichomancy for Jessica Biel

The first excerpt represents the element of Air. It speaks of mental influences and the process of thought, and is drawn from Faraday as a Discoverer by John Tyndall:

a room is to his mind such a coating; the walls are the outer coating, while the air between both is the insulator, across which the charge acts by induction. Without this reaction of the walls upon the sphere you could no more, according to Faraday, charge it with electricity than you could charge a Leyden jar, if its outer coating were removed. Distance with him is immaterial. His strength as a generalizer enables him to dissolve the idea of magnitude; and if you abolish the walls of the room--even the earth itself--he would make the sun and planets the outer coating of his jar. I dare not contend that Faraday in these memoirs made all his theoretic positions good. But a pure vein of philosophy runs through these

The second excerpt represents the element of Fire. It speaks of emotional influences and base passions, and is drawn from The Man against the Sky by Edwin Arlington Robinson:

Think you that you are to go on Forever pampered and untried?

"What lost eclipse of history, What bivouac of the marching stars, Has given the sign for you to see Millenniums and last great wars?

"What unrecorded overthrow Of all the world has ever known, Or ever been, has made itself So plain to you, and you alone?

"Your Dollar, Dove and Eagle make

The third excerpt represents the element of Water. It speaks of pure spiritual influences and feelings of love, and is drawn from Criminal Sociology by Enrico Ferri:

consequence of my ideas on the anthropological and physical character of crime, and that, ``on the contrary, the preponderating importance which he has assigned to the social causes logically debars him from accepting this conclusion.'' As a matter of fact, punishment regarded as a psychological motive so far as it is a legal deterrent, and as a physical motive so far as it implies the confinement of the person condemned, would more naturally belong, in abstract

logic, to the biological and physical theory of crime. Whereas it is precisely because I recognise the influence of social environment, in addition, that experimental logic convinces me that punishment is not an

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 Concerning Christian Liberty by Martin Luther:

down the mighty from their seat, and hath exalted the humble." See how unlike Christ was to His successors, though all will have it that they are His vicars. I fear that in truth very many of them have been in too serious a sense His vicars, for a vicar represents a prince who is absent. Now if a pontiff rules while Christ is absent and does not dwell in his heart, what else is he but a vicar of Christ? And then what is that Church but a multitude without Christ? What indeed is such a vicar but antichrist and an idol? How much more rightly did the Apostles speak, who call themselves servants of a present Christ, not the vicars of an absent one!