| The first excerpt represents the past or something you must release, and is drawn from Protagoras by Plato: by pleasure, would not have been wrong. 'But how,' he will reply, 'can the
good be unworthy of the evil, or the evil of the good'? Is not the real
explanation that they are out of proportion to one another, either as
greater and smaller, or more and fewer? This we cannot deny. And when you
speak of being overcome--'what do you mean,' he will say, 'but that you
choose the greater evil in exchange for the lesser good?' Admitted. And
now substitute the names of pleasure and pain for good and evil, and say,
not as before, that a man does what is evil knowingly, but that he does
what is painful knowingly, and because he is overcome by pleasure, which is
unworthy to overcome. What measure is there of the relations of pleasure
to pain other than excess and defect, which means that they become greater
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The second excerpt represents the present or the deciding factor of the moment, and is drawn from In Darkest England and The Way Out by General William Booth: waste Continent of humanity--three million human beings who are
enslaved--some of them to taskmasters as merciless as any West Indian
overseer, all of them to destitution and despair?
Is anything to be done with them? Can anything be done for them?
Or is this million-headed mass to be regarded as offering a problem as
insoluble as that of the London sewage, which, feculent and festering,
swings heavily up and down the basin of the Thames with the ebb and
flow of the tide?
This Submerged Tenth--is it, then, beyond the reach of the
nine-tenths in the midst of whom they live, and around whose homes they
rot and die? No doubt, in every large mass of human beings there will
In Darkest England and The Way Out |
The third excerpt represents the future or something you must embrace, and is drawn from Second Inaugural Address by Abraham Lincoln: It may seem strange that any men should dare to ask a just God's
assistance in wringing their bread from the sweat of other men's faces;
but let us judge not, that we be not judged. The prayers of both
could not be answered--that of neither has been answered fully.
The Almighty has his own purposes. "Woe unto the world because
of offenses! for it must needs be that offenses come; but woe
to that man by whom the offense cometh." If we shall suppose
that American slavery is one of those offenses which, in the
providence of God, must needs come, but which, having continued
through his appointed time, he now wills to remove, and that he
gives to both North and South this terrible war, as the woe due
Second Inaugural Address |
