| The first excerpt represents the past or something you must release, and is drawn from In Darkest England and The Way Out by General William Booth: Salvation Officers and Soldiers. If those who wish to understand the
Army would only take the trouble to spend as much as twenty-four hours
with its people, how different in almost every instance would be the
conclusions arrived at. Half-an-hour spent in the rooms inhabited by
many of our officers would be sufficient to convince, even a well-to-do
working man, that life could not be lived happily in such circumstances
without some superhuman power, which alike sustains and gladdens the
soul, altogether independently of earthly surroundings.
The Scheme that has been propounded in this volume would, we are quite
satisfied, have no chance of success were it not for the fact that we
have such a vast supply of men and women who, through the love of
In Darkest England and The Way Out |
The second excerpt represents the present or the deciding factor of the moment, and is drawn from Across The Plains by Robert Louis Stevenson: far must he respect that smiling face, so easy to cloud, so hard to
brighten again? And how far, on the other side, is he bound to be
his brother's keeper and the prophet of his own morality? How far
must he resent evil?
The difficulty is that we have little guidance; Christ's sayings on
the point being hard to reconcile with each other, and (the most of
them) hard to accept. But the truth of his teaching would seem to
be this: in our own person and fortune, we should be ready to
accept and to pardon all; it is OUR cheek we are to turn, OUR coat
that we are to give away to the man who has taken OUR cloak. But
when another's face is buffeted, perhaps a little of the lion will
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The third excerpt represents the future or something you must embrace, and is drawn from A House of Pomegranates by Oscar Wilde: at best, for it was a bitter and black-winged wind, and rough waves
rose up to meet it. But when the wind blew to the shore, the fish
came in from the deep, and swam into the meshes of his nets, and he
took them to the market-place and sold them.
Every evening he went out upon the sea, and one evening the net was
so heavy that hardly could he draw it into the boat. And he
laughed, and said to himself, 'Surely I have caught all the fish
that swim, or snared some dull monster that will be a marvel to
men, or some thing of horror that the great Queen will desire,' and
putting forth all his strength, he tugged at the coarse ropes till,
like lines of blue enamel round a vase of bronze, the long veins
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