| The first excerpt represents the past or something you must release, and is drawn from Pivot of Civilization by Margaret Sanger: usage; it discourages criticism and enquiry. It is very ancient and
conservative, or, going beyond conservation, it is reactionary. The
vehement hostility of many Catholic priests and prelates towards new
views of human origins, and new views of moral questions, has led many
careless thinkers to identify this old traditional civilization with
Christianity, but that identification ignores the strongly
revolutionary and initiatory spirit that has always animated
Christianity, and is untrue even to the realities of orthodox Catholic
teaching. The vituperation of individual Catholics must not be
confused with the deliberate doctrines of the Church which have, on
the whole, been conspicuously cautious and balanced and sane in these
|
The second excerpt represents the present or the deciding factor of the moment, and is drawn from The Altar of the Dead by Henry James: fitful worshipper was that he found the years of his life there,
and the ties, the affections, the struggles, the submissions, the
conquests, if there had been such, a record of that adventurous
journey in which the beginnings and the endings of human relations
are the lettered mile-stones. He had in general little taste for
the past as a part of his own history; at other times and in other
places it mostly seemed to him pitiful to consider and impossible
to repair; but on these occasions he accepted it with something of
that positive gladness with which one adjusts one's self to an ache
that begins to succumb to treatment. To the treatment of time the
malady of life begins at a given moment to succumb; and these were
|
The third excerpt represents the future or something you must embrace, and is drawn from Twelve Stories and a Dream by H. G. Wells: "I know nothing about it," said the Doctor, "and I don't WANT to know.
I attended him for a broken finger--Married and Single cricket match--
and that's when I struck the nonsense. That's all. But it shows you
the sort of stuff I have to deal with, anyhow, eh? Nice to get
modern sanitary ideas into a people like this!"
"Very," I said in a mildly sympathetic tone, and he went on to tell
me about that business of the Bonham drain. Things of that kind,
I observe, are apt to weigh on the minds of Medical Officers of Health.
I was as sympathetic as I knew how, and when he called the Bonham
people "asses," I said they were "thundering asses," but even that
did not allay him.
|
