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The excerpt represents the core issue or deciding factor on which you must meditate, and is drawn from Christ in Flanders by Honore de Balzac: to the will of God, like folk whose wont it is to fall in
instinctively with the ways of Nature like cattle. At the one end of
the boat stood riches, pride, learning, debauchery, and crime--human
society, such as art and thought and education and worldly interests
and laws have made it; and at this end there was terror and wailing,
innumerable different impulses all repressed by hideous doubts--at
this end, and at this only, the agony of fear.
Above all these human lives stood a strong man, the skipper; no doubts
assailed him, the chief, the king, the fatalist among them. He was
trusting in himself rather than in Providence, crying, "Bail away!"
instead of "Holy Virgin," defying the storm, in fact, and struggling
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