| The first excerpt represents the element of Air. It speaks of mental influences and the process of thought, and is drawn from Commentary on the Epistle to the Galatians by Martin Luther: Our merciful Father in heaven saw how the Law oppressed us and how
impossible it was for us to get out from under the curse of the Law. He
therefore sent His only Son into the world and said to Him: "You are now
Peter, the liar; Paul, the persecutor; David, the adulterer; Adam, the
disobedient; the thief on the cross. You, My Son, must pay the world's
iniquity." The Law growls: "All right. If Your Son is taking the sin of the
world, I see no sins anywhere else but in Him. He shall die on the Cross."
And the Law kills Christ. But we go free.
The argument of the Apostle against the righteousness of the Law is
impregnable. If Christ bears our sins, we do not bear them. But if Christ is
innocent of our sins and does not bear them, we must bear them, and we
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The second excerpt represents the element of Fire. It speaks of emotional influences and base passions, and is drawn from The Lock and Key Library by Julian Hawthorne, Ed.: was betrayed into a false marriage, and her life ruined by a man
who came into the house as her brother's friend, and whose infamous
designs were forwarded and finally accomplished by that same
brother's active though unsuspecting assistance. Generation after
generation, men or women, guilty or innocent, through the action of
their own will or in spite of it, the curse has never yet failed of
its victims."
"Never yet? But surely in our own time--your father?" I did not
dare to put the question which was burning my lips.
"Have you never heard of the tragic end of my poor young uncles?"
he replied. "They were several years older than my father. When
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| The third excerpt represents the element of Water. It speaks of pure spiritual influences and feelings of love, and is drawn from The Deserted Woman by Honore de Balzac: by womanly charm and wit, which at first he had not perceived. He fell
to wandering musings, in which the most lucid thoughts grow refractory
and flatly contradict each other, and the soul passes through a brief
frenzy fit. Youth only can understand all that lies in the dithyrambic
outpourings of youth when, after a stormy siege, of the most frantic
folly and coolest common-sense, the heart finally yields to the
assault of the latest comer, be it hope, or despair, as some
mysterious power determines.
At three-and-twenty, diffidence nearly always rules a man's conduct;
he is perplexed with a young girl's shyness, a girl's trouble; he is
afraid lest he should express his love ill, sees nothing but
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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 In the Cage by Henry James: would have gone straight toward Park Chambers and have hung about
there till no matter when. She would have waited, stayed, rung,
asked, have gone in, sat on the stairs. What the day was the last
of was probably, to her strained inner sense, the group of golden
ones, of any occasion for seeing the hazy sunshine slant at that
angle into the smelly shop, of any range of chances for his wishing
still to repeat to her the two words she had in the Park scarcely
let him bring out. "See here--see here!"--the sound of these two
words had been with her perpetually; but it was in her ears to-day
without mercy, with a loudness that grew and grew. What was it
they then expressed? what was it he had wanted her to see? She
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