| The first excerpt represents the past or something you must release, and is drawn from In Darkest England and The Way Out by General William Booth: which seems to us to be a condition of Salvation. But this suggestion
is of a different kind. It is not imposed as a means of grace.
It is not put forward as a preliminary to the absolution which no one
can pronounce but our Lord Himself. It is merely a response on our
part to one of the deepest needs and secret longings of the actual men
and women who are meeting us daily in our work. Why should they be
left to brood in misery over their secret sin, when a plain
straightforward talk with a man or woman selected for his or her
sympathetic common-sense and spiritual experience might take the weight
off their shoulders which is crushing them into dull despair?
Not for absolution, but for sympathy and direction, do I propose to
In Darkest England and The Way Out |
The second excerpt represents the present or the deciding factor of the moment, and is drawn from Father Damien by Robert Louis Stevenson: it be measured you again; with you, at last, I rejoice to feel the
button off the foil and to plunge home. And if in aught that I
shall say I should offend others, your colleagues, whom I respect
and remember with affection, I can but offer them my regret; I am
not free, I am inspired by the consideration of interests far more
large; and such pain as can be inflicted by anything from me must
be indeed trifling when compared with the pain with which they read
your letter. It is not the hangman, but the criminal, that brings
dishonour on the house.
You belong, sir, to a sect - I believe my sect, and that in which
my ancestors laboured - which has enjoyed, and partly failed to
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The third excerpt represents the future or something you must embrace, and is drawn from Gorgias by Plato: even as a painter of figures, if there were other painters of figures;
neither can you define rhetoric simply as an art of persuasion, because
there are other arts which persuade, such as arithmetic, which is an art of
persuasion about odd and even numbers. Gorgias is made to see the
necessity of a further limitation, and he now defines rhetoric as the art
of persuading in the law courts, and in the assembly, about the just and
unjust. But still there are two sorts of persuasion: one which gives
knowledge, and another which gives belief without knowledge; and knowledge
is always true, but belief may be either true or false,--there is therefore
a further question: which of the two sorts of persuasion does rhetoric
effect in courts of law and assemblies? Plainly that which gives belief
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