| The first excerpt represents the past or something you must release, and is drawn from An Episode Under the Terror by Honore de Balzac: be."
At the first words the man started with terror, in spite of himself.
Then he recovered composure, and looked quietly at the astonished
priest.
"Father," he said, and the other could not miss the tremor in his
voice, "no one is more guiltless than I of the blood shed----"
"I am bound to believe you," said the priest. He paused a moment, and
again he scrutinized his penitent. But, persisting in the idea that
the man before him was one of the members of the Convention, one of
the voters who betrayed an inviolable and anointed head to save their
own, he began again gravely:
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The second excerpt represents the present or the deciding factor of the moment, and is drawn from Maitre Cornelius by Honore de Balzac: between religion and love. In the first place society had no meeting-
place except before the altar. Lords and vassals, men and women were
equals nowhere else. There alone could lovers see each other and
communicate. The festivals of the Church were the theatre of former
times; the soul of woman was more keenly stirred in a cathedral than
it is at a ball or the opera in our day; and do not strong emotions
invariably bring women back to love? By dint of mingling with life and
grasping it in all its acts and interests, religion had made itself a
sharer of all virtues, the accomplice of all vices. Religion had
passed into science, into politics, into eloquence, into crimes, into
the flesh of the sick man and the poor man; it mounted thrones; it was
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The third excerpt represents the future or something you must embrace, and is drawn from The Autocrat of the Breakfast-Table by Oliver Wendell Holmes: gracious, unassuming people in the world, and yet preeminent in the
ranges of science I am referring to. I know that as well as you.
But mark this which I am going to say once for all: If I had not
force enough to project a principle full in the face of the half
dozen most obvious facts which seem to contradict it, I would think
only in single file from this day forward. A rash man, once
visiting a certain noted institution at South Boston, ventured to
express the sentiment, that man is a rational being. An old woman
who was an attendant in the Idiot School contradicted the
statement, and appealed to the facts before the speaker to disprove
it. The rash man stuck to his hasty generalization,
The Autocrat of the Breakfast-Table |
