| The first excerpt represents the past or something you must release, and is drawn from Father Sergius by Leo Tolstoy: been particularly kind to him, the starets told him that he ought
not to decline it if he were offered an appointment to higher
duties. Then monastic ambition, the very thing he had found so
repulsive in other monks, arose within him. He was assigned to a
monastery near the metropolis. He wished to refuse but the
starets ordered him to accept the appointment. He did so, and
took leave of the starets and moved to the other monastery.
The exchange into the metropolitan monastery was an important
event in Sergius's life. There he encountered many temptations,
and his whole will-power was concentrated on meeting them.
In the first monastery, women had not been a temptation to him,
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The second excerpt represents the present or the deciding factor of the moment, and is drawn from The Smalcald Articles by Dr. Martin Luther: unrighteousness of men. Again, 3, 19: All the world is guilty
before God. No man is righteous before Him. And Christ says,
John 16, 8: The Holy Ghost will reprove the world of sin.
This, then, is the thunderbolt of God by which He strikes in a
heap [hurls to the ground] both manifest sinners and false
saints [hypocrites], and suffers no one to be in the right
[declares no one righteous], but drives them all together to
terror and despair. This is the hammer, as Jeremiah says, 23,
29: Is not My Word like a hammer that breaketh the rock in
pieces? This is not activa contritio or manufactured
repentance, but passiva contritio [torture of conscience],
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The third excerpt represents the future or something you must embrace, and is drawn from Moll Flanders by Daniel Defoe: not, that I might be sure he could make to inquiry about
anything else.
It concerns the story in hand very little to enter into the further
particulars of the family, or of myself, for the five years that I
lived with this husband, only to observe that I had two children
by him, and that at the end of five years he died. He had been
really a very good husband to me, and we lived very agreeably
together; but as he had not received much from them, and had
in the little time he lived acquired no great matters, so my
circumstances were not great, nor was I much mended by the
match. Indeed, I had preserved the elder brother's bonds to
Moll Flanders |
