| The first excerpt represents the element of Air. It speaks of mental influences and the process of thought, and is drawn from The Varieties of Religious Experience by William James: type of character. Single attributes of saintliness may, it is
true, be temperamental endowments, found in non-religious
individuals. But the whole group of them forms a combination
which, as such, is religious, for it seems to flow from the sense
of the divine as from its psychological centre. Whoever
possesses strongly this sense comes naturally to think that the
smallest details of this world derive infinite significance from
their relation to an unseen divine order. The thought of this
order yields him a superior denomination of happiness, and a
steadfastness of soul with which no other can compare. In social
relations his serviceability is exemplary; he abounds in impulses
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The second excerpt represents the element of Fire. It speaks of emotional influences and base passions, and is drawn from Catherine de Medici by Honore de Balzac: necessity of a religion, the necessity of authority, and then to leave
to subjects the right to deny religion, attack its worship, oppose the
exercise of power by public expression communicable and communicated
by thought, was an impossibility which the Catholics of the sixteenth
century would not hear of.
Alas! the victory of Calvinism will cost France more in the future
than it has yet cost her; for religious sects and humanitarian,
equality-levelling politics are, to-day, the tail of Calvinism; and,
judging by the mistakes of the present power, its contempt for
intellect, its love for material interests, in which it seeks the
basis of its support (though material interests are the most
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