| The third excerpt represents the element of Water. It speaks of pure spiritual influences and feelings of love, and is drawn from Rasselas, Prince of Abyssinia by Samuel Johnson: indulge my quiet by criminal negligence, and voluntarily forget the
great charge with which I am entrusted. If I favour myself in a
known error, or am determined by my own ease in a doubtful question
of this importance, how dreadful is my crime!"
"No disease of the imagination," answered Imlac, "is so difficult
of cure as that which is complicated with the dread of guilt; fancy
and conscience then act interchangeably upon us, and so often shift
their places, that the illusions of one are not distinguished from
the dictates of the other. If fancy presents images not moral or
religious, the mind drives them away when they give it pain; but
when melancholy notions take the form of duty, they lay hold on the
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The fourth excerpt represents the element of Earth. It speaks of physical influences and the impact of the unseen on the visible world, and is drawn from The Varieties of Religious Experience by William James: 'perfect as their Father in heaven is perfect.' The sense of
alienation and distance from God which had grown upon the pious
in Israel just in proportion as they had learned to look upon Him
as no mere national divinity, but as a God of justice who would
punish Israel for its sin as certainly as Edom or Moab, is
declared to be no longer in place; and the typical form of
Christian prayer points to the abolition of the contrast between
this world and the next which through all the history of the Jews
had continually been growing wider: 'As in heaven, so on earth.'
The sense of the division of man from God, as a finite being from
the Infinite, as weak and sinful from the Omnipotent Goodness, is
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