| The first excerpt represents the past or something you must release, and is drawn from Memories and Portraits by Robert Louis Stevenson: about his tall stooping form, and an earnestness in his wrinkled
face that recalled Don Quixote; but a Don Quixote who had come
through the training of the Covenant, and been nourished in his
youth on WALKER'S LIVES and THE HIND LET LOOSE.
Now, as I could not bear to let such a man pass away with no sketch
preserved of his old-fashioned virtues, I hope the reader will take
this as an excuse for the present paper, and judge as kindly as he
can the infirmities of my description. To me, who find it so
difficult to tell the little that I know, he stands essentially as
a GENIUS LOCI. It is impossible to separate his spare form and old
straw hat from the garden in the lap of the hill, with its rocks
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The second excerpt represents the present or the deciding factor of the moment, and is drawn from A treatise on Good Works by Dr. Martin Luther: thing, unbelief; it requires but one thing, faith, "that
confidence in God's good will at all times." Without this faith
the best works are as nothing, and if man should think that by
them he could be well-pleasing to God, he would be lowering God
to the level of a "broker or a laborer who will not dispense his
grace and kindness gratis."
This understanding of faith and good works, so Luther now
addresses his opponents, should in fairness be kept in view by
those who accuse him of declaiming against good works, and they
should learn from it, that though he has preached against "good
works," it was against such as are falsely so called and as
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The third excerpt represents the future or something you must embrace, and is drawn from Christ in Flanders by Honore de Balzac: brown cloud that seemed about to unloose a furious gale. There was a
smothered murmur of the sea, a moaning sound that seemed to come from
the depths, a low warning growl, such as a dog gives when he only
means mischief as yet. After all, Ostend was not far away. Perhaps
painting, like poetry, could not prolong the existence of the picture
presented by sea and sky at that moment beyond the time of its actual
duration. Art demands vehement contrasts, wherefore artists usually
seek out Nature's most striking effects, doubtless because they
despair of rendering the great and glorious charm of her daily moods;
yet the human soul is often stirred as deeply by her calm as by her
emotion, and by silence as by storm.
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