| The first excerpt represents the past or something you must release, and is drawn from Vailima Prayers & Sabbath Morn by Robert Louis Stevenson: protection that he would miss were the prayer forgotten. The
average Samoan is but a larger child in most things, and would lay
an uneasy head on his wooden pillow if he had not joined, even
perfunctorily, in the evening service. With my husband, prayer,
the direct appeal, was a necessity. When he was happy he felt
impelled to offer thanks for that undeserved joy; when in sorrow,
or pain, to call for strength to bear what must be borne.
Vailima lay up some three miles of continual rise from Apia, and
more than half that distance from the nearest village. It was a
long way for a tired man to walk down every evening with the sole
purpose of joining in family worship; and the road through the bush
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The second excerpt represents the present or the deciding factor of the moment, and is drawn from Ion by Plato: SOCRATES: And Homer in a better way?
ION: He is incomparably better.
SOCRATES: And yet surely, my dear friend Ion, in a discussion about
arithmetic, where many people are speaking, and one speaks better than the
rest, there is somebody who can judge which of them is the good speaker?
ION: Yes.
SOCRATES: And he who judges of the good will be the same as he who judges
of the bad speakers?
ION: The same.
SOCRATES: And he will be the arithmetician?
ION: Yes.
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The third excerpt represents the future or something you must embrace, and is drawn from Plutarch's Lives by A. H. Clough: Cominius, and partake in the peril of the action.
It was customary with the Romans of that age, when they were moving into
battle array, and were on the point of taking up their bucklers, and
girding their coats about them, to make at the same time an unwritten
will, or verbal testament, and to name who should be their heirs, in the
hearing of three or four witnesses. In this precise posture Marcius
found them at his arrival, the enemy being advanced within view.
They were not a little disturbed by his first appearance, seeing him
covered with blood and sweat, and attended with a small train; but when
he hastily made up to the consul with gladness in his looks, giving him
his hand, and recounting to him how the city had been taken, and when
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