| The first excerpt represents the element of Air. It speaks of mental influences and the process of thought, and is drawn from An Open Letter on Translating by Dr. Martin Luther: many others who said it before me. And if one is to read and
understand St. Paul, the same thing must be said and not anything
else. His words, as well, are blunt - "no works" - none at all!
If it is not works, it must be faith alone. Oh what a marvelous,
constructive and inoffensive teaching that would be, to be taught
that one can be saved by works as well as by faith. That would be
like saying that it is not Christ's death alone that takes away
our sin but that our works have something to do with it. Now that
would be a fine way of honoring Christ's death, saying that it is
helped by our works, and that whatever it does our works can also
do - that we are his equal in goodness and power. This is the
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The second excerpt represents the element of Fire. It speaks of emotional influences and base passions, and is drawn from Eighteenth Brumaire of Louis Bonaparte by Karl Marx: But in all these defeats, the proletariat succumbs at least with the
honor that attaches to great historic struggles; not France alone, all
Europe trembles before the June earthquake, while the successive defeats
inflicted upon the higher classes are bought so easily that they need
the brazen exaggeration of the victorious party itself to be at all able
to pass muster as an event; and these defeats become more disgraceful
the further removed the defeated party stands from the proletariat.
True enough, the defeat of the June insurgents prepared, leveled the
ground, upon which the bourgeois republic could be founded and erected;
but it, at the same time, showed that there are in Europe other issues
besides that of "Republic or Monarchy." It revealed the fact that here
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