| The first excerpt represents the past or something you must release, and is drawn from Commentary on the Epistle to the Galatians by Martin Luther: the honor."
Ishmael was thus born without a special word or promise of God, at the
mere request of Sarah. God did not command Abraham to take Hagar, nor
did God promise to bless the coalition. It is evident that Ishmael was the
son of Abraham after the flesh, and not after the promise.
In the ninth chapter of the Epistle to the Romans St. Paul advances the
same argument which he amplifies into an allegory in writing to the
Galatians. There he argues that all the children of Abraham are not the
children of God. For Abraham had two kinds of children, children born of
the promise, like Isaac, and other children born without the promise, as
Ishmael. With this argument Paul squelched the proud Jews who gloried
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The second excerpt represents the present or the deciding factor of the moment, and is drawn from The Ancient Regime by Charles Kingsley: vigorous characters, those proud and daring spirits, which were to
make the French Revolution at once the object of the admiration and
the terror of succeeding generations."
This liberty--too much akin to anarchy, in which indeed it issued
for awhile--seems to have asserted itself in continual petty
resistance to officials whom they did not respect, and who, in their
turn, were more than a little afraid of the very men out of whose
ranks they had sprung.
The French Government--one may say, every Government on the
Continent in those days--had the special weakness of all
bureaucracies; namely, that want of moral force which compels them
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The third excerpt represents the future or something you must embrace, and is drawn from The Great God Pan by Arthur Machen: "Look at this neat little packet of manuscript; it is
paginated, you see, and I have indulged in the civil coquetry
of a ribbon of red tape. It has almost a legal air, hasn't it?
Run your eye over it, Austin. It is an account of the
entertainment Mrs. Beaumont provided for her choicer guests.
The man who wrote this escaped with his life, but I do not
think he will live many years. The doctors tell him he must
have sustained some severe shock to the nerves."
Austin took the manuscript, but never read it. Opening
the neat pages at haphazard his eye was caught by a word and a
phrase that followed it; and, sick at heart, with white lips and
The Great God Pan |
