| The first excerpt represents the element of Air. It speaks of mental influences and the process of thought, and is drawn from Flatland: A Romance of Many Dimensions by Edwin A. Abbot: of the past and the prospects of the coming year, the coming century,
the coming Millennium.
[Note: When I say "sitting", of course I do not mean
any change of attitude such as you in Spaceland signify by that word;
for as we have no feet, we can no more "sit" nor "stand"
(in your sense of the word) than one of your soles or flounders.
Nevertheless, we perfectly well recognize the different mental states
of volition implied in "lying", "sitting", and "standing",
which are to some extent indicated to a beholder by a slight
increase of lustre corresponding to the increase of volition.
But on this, and a thousand other kindred subjects, time forbids me
Flatland: A Romance of Many Dimensions |
The second excerpt represents the element of Fire. It speaks of emotional influences and base passions, and is drawn from God The Invisible King by H. G. Wells: readily liberate cruelty and tyranny. It is like a woman going with
a light to tend and protect her sleeping child, and setting the
house on fire. None the less, right down to to-day, the heresy of
God the Revengeful, God the Persecutor and Avenger, haunts religion.
It is only in quite recent years that the growing gentleness of
everyday life has begun to make men a little ashamed of a Deity less
tolerant and gentle than themselves. The recent literature of the
Anglicans abounds in the evidence of this trouble.
Bishop Colenso of Natal was prosecuted and condemned in 1863 for
denying the irascibility of his God and teaching "the Kaffirs of
Natal" the dangerous heresy that God is all mercy. "We cannot allow
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