| The first excerpt represents the past or something you must release, and is drawn from Rasselas, Prince of Abyssinia by Samuel Johnson: to do wrong in order to do right. When we pursue our end by lawful
means, we may always console our miscarriage by the hope of future
recompense. When we consult only our own policy, and attempt to
find a nearer way to good by over-leaping the settled boundaries of
right and wrong, we cannot be happy even by success, because we
cannot escape the consciousness of our fault; but if we miscarry,
the disappointment is irremediably embittered. How comfortless is
the sorrow of him who feels at once the pangs of guilt and the
vexation of calamity which guilt has brought upon him!
"Consider, Princess, what would have been your condition if the
Lady Pekuah had entreated to accompany you, and, being compelled to
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The second excerpt represents the present or the deciding factor of the moment, and is drawn from Marie by H. Rider Haggard: shot."
"Good, I will go," said the vrouw, and she went, the guards letting her
pass after a few words which we could not hear.
Half an hour later she returned and called to us to open the door.
"Well?" I asked.
"Well," she said, "I have failed, nephew. Except those sentries outside
the door, the commandant and all the Boers have ridden off, I know not
where, taking our people with them."
"That's odd," I answered, "but I suppose they thought they had not
enough grass for their horses, or Heaven knows what they thought. Stay
now, I will do something," and, opening the door, I called to the
Marie |
The third excerpt represents the future or something you must embrace, and is drawn from Alexandria and her Schools by Charles Kingsley: The Christian remnant became tributaries; and Alexandria dwindled, from
that time forth, into a petty seaport town.
And now--can we pass over this new metaphysical school of Alexandria?
Can we help inquiring in what the strength of Islamism lay? I, at
least, cannot. I cannot help feeling that I am bound to examine in what
relation the creed of Omar and Amrou stands to the Alexandrian
speculations of five hundred years, and how it had power to sweep those
speculations utterly from the Eastern mind. It is a difficult problem;
to me, as a Christian priest, a very awful problem. What more awful
historic problem, than to see the lower creed destroying the higher? to
see God, as it were, undoing his own work, and repenting Him that He had
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