| The first excerpt represents the past or something you must release, and is drawn from A Voyage to Abyssinia by Father Lobo: indeed before there were any in the world.
Whilst I was in these mountains, I went on Sundays and saints' days
sometimes to one church and sometimes to another. One day I went
out with a resolution not to go to a certain church, where I
imagined there was no occasion for me, but before I had gone far, I
found myself pressed by a secret impulse to return back to that same
church. I obeyed the influence, and discovered it to proceed from
the mercy of God to three young children who were destitute of all
succour, and at the point of death. I found two very quickly in
this miserable state; the mother had retired to some distance that
she might not see them die, and when she saw me stop, came and told
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The second excerpt represents the present or the deciding factor of the moment, and is drawn from Phaedrus by Plato: and passionate elements have no place in His nature. So we should infer
from the reason of the thing, but there is no indication in Plato's own
writings that this was his meaning. Or, again, when he explains the
different characters of men by referring them back to the nature of the God
whom they served in a former state of existence, we are inclined to ask
whether he is serious: Is he not rather using a mythological figure, here
as elsewhere, to draw a veil over things which are beyond the limits of
mortal knowledge? Once more, in speaking of beauty is he really thinking
of some external form such as might have been expressed in the works of
Phidias or Praxiteles; and not rather of an imaginary beauty, of a sort
which extinguishes rather than stimulates vulgar love,--a heavenly beauty
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The third excerpt represents the future or something you must embrace, and is drawn from Glasses by Henry James: which had opened out on such a scale that, with a deep plunge into
a great chance, I was three good years in rising again to the
surface. There are nymphs and naiads moreover in the American
depths: they may have had something to do with the duration of my
dive. I mention them to account for a grave misdemeanor--the fact
that after the first year I rudely neglected Mrs. Meldrum. She had
written to me from Florence after my mother's death and had
mentioned in a postscript that in our young lady's calculations the
lowest figures were now Italian counts. This was a good omen, and
if in subsequent letters there was no news of a sequel I was
content to accept small things and to believe that grave tidings,
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