| The first excerpt represents the past or something you must release, and is drawn from Historical Lecturers and Essays by Charles Kingsley: probably invented by our Government in order to pander to the vanity
of the English nation.
I will say this, which Archbishop Whately, in a late edition,
foreshadows, wittily enough--that if one or two thousand years
hence, when the history of the late Emperor Napoleon the Third, his
rise and fall, shall come to be subjected to critical analysis by
future Philistine historians of New Zealand or Australia, it will be
proved by them to be utterly mythical, incredible, monstrous--and
that all the more, the more the actual facts remain to puzzle their
unimaginative brains. What will they make two thousand years hence,
of the landing at Boulogne with the tame eagle? Will not that, and
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The second excerpt represents the present or the deciding factor of the moment, and is drawn from The Land that Time Forgot by Edgar Rice Burroughs: for it wasn't half an hour before we saw more smoke on the
horizon, and this time the vessel flew the white ensign of the
Royal Navy and carried guns. She didn't veer to the north or
anywhere else, but bore down on us rapidly. I was just preparing
to signal her, when a flame flashed from her bows, and an instant
later the water in front of us was thrown high by the explosion
of a shell.
Bradley had come on deck and was standing beside me. "About one
more of those, and she'll have our range," he said. "She doesn't
seem to take much stock in our Union Jack."
A second shell passed over us, and then I gave the command to
The Land that Time Forgot |
The third excerpt represents the future or something you must embrace, and is drawn from Euthyphro by Plato: science, and give my mind to it, and therefore nothing which you say will
be thrown away upon me. Please then to tell me, what is the nature of this
service to the gods? Do you mean that we prefer requests and give gifts to
them?
EUTHYPHRO: Yes, I do.
SOCRATES: Is not the right way of asking to ask of them what we want?
EUTHYPHRO: Certainly.
SOCRATES: And the right way of giving is to give to them in return what
they want of us. There would be no meaning in an art which gives to any
one that which he does not want.
EUTHYPHRO: Very true, Socrates.
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