| The first excerpt represents the element of Air. It speaks of mental influences and the process of thought, and is drawn from The Unseen World and Other Essays by John Fiske: Christ whom he preaches is the man Jesus, the founder of a new
and spiritual order of humanity, as Adam was the father of
humanity after the flesh. The resurrection is uniformly described
by him as a manifestation of the power of Jehovah, not of Jesus
himself. The later conception of Christ bursting the barred gates
of Sheol, and arising by his own might to heaven, finds no
warrant in the expressions of Paul. Indeed, it was essential to
Paul's theory of the Messiah as a new Adam, that he should be
human and not divine; for the escape of a divine being from Sheol
could afford no precedent and furnish no assurance of the future
escape of human beings. It was expressly because the man Jesus
The Unseen World and Other Essays |
The second excerpt represents the element of Fire. It speaks of emotional influences and base passions, and is drawn from The Letters of Robert Louis Stevenson by Robert Louis Stevenson: my literary art.
Letter: TO W. H. LOW
SKERRYVORE, BOURNEMOUTH, DECEMBER 26, 1885.
MY DEAR LOW, - LAMIA has not yet turned up, but your letter came to
me this evening with a scent of the Boulevard Montparnasse that was
irresistible. The sand of Lavenue's crumbled under my heel; and
the bouquet of the old Fleury came back to me, and I remembered the
day when I found a twenty franc piece under my fetish. Have you
that fetish still? and has it brought you luck? I remembered, too,
my first sight of you in a frock coat and a smoking-cap, when we
passed the evening at the Cafe de Medicis; and my last when we sat
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