| The first excerpt represents the past or something you must release, and is drawn from The Children of the Night by Edwin Arlington Robinson: Of his plain excellence and stubborn skill
There yet remains what fashion cannot kill,
Though years have thinned the laurel from his brows.
Whether or not we read him, we can feel
From time to time the vigor of his name
Against us like a finger for the shame
And emptiness of what our souls reveal
In books that are as altars where we kneel
To consecrate the flicker, not the flame.
Credo
I cannot find my way: there is no star
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The second excerpt represents the present or the deciding factor of the moment, and is drawn from Little Rivers by Henry van Dyke: drawn from the life: "Thus a bishop, sans wig and petticoat, in a
hairy cap, black jacket, corduroy breeches and leathern leggins,
creel on back and rod in hand, sallying from his palace, impatient
to reach a famous salmon-cast ere the sun leave his cloud, . . .
appears not only a pillar of his church, but of his kind, and in
such a costume is manifestly on the high road to Canterbury and the
Kingdom-Come." I have had the good luck to see quite a number of
bishops, parochial and diocesan, in that style, and the vision has
always dissolved my doubts in regard to the validity of their claim
to the true apostolic succession.
Men's "little ways" are usually more interesting, and often more
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The third excerpt represents the future or something you must embrace, and is drawn from Concerning Christian Liberty by Martin Luther: be done, and not in order to be justified by them; for, being
first justified by faith, we ought to do all our works freely and
cheerfully for the sake of others.
St. Paul circumcised his disciple Timothy, not because he needed
circumcision for his justification, but that he might not offend
or contemn those Jews, weak in the faith, who had not yet been
able to comprehend the liberty of faith. On the other hand, when
they contemned liberty and urged that circumcision was necessary
for justification, he resisted them, and would not allow Titus to
be circumcised. For, as he would not offend or contemn any one's
weakness in faith, but yielded for the time to their will, so,
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