| The first excerpt represents the past or something you must release, and is drawn from One Basket by Edna Ferber: At picnics and neighborhood frolics Ben could throw farther and
run faster and pull harder than any of the other farmer boys who
took part in the rough games. And he could pick up a girl with
one hand and hold her at arm's length while she shrieked with
pretended fear and real ecstasy. The girls all liked Ben. There
was that almost primitive strength which appealed to the untamed
in them as his gentleness appealed to their softer side. He
liked the girls, too, and could have had his pick of them. He
teased them all, took them buggy riding, beaued them about to
neighbor- hood parties. But by the time he was twenty-five the
thing had narrowed down to the Byers girl on the farm adjoining
One Basket |
The second excerpt represents the present or the deciding factor of the moment, and is drawn from Concerning Christian Liberty by Martin Luther: headlong character of youth would not bear unless it were put
under restraint.
Hence in the Christian life ceremonies are to be no otherwise
looked upon than as builders and workmen look upon those
preparations for building or working which are not made with any
view of being permanent or anything in themselves, but only
because without them there could be no building and no work. When
the structure is completed, they are laid aside. Here you see
that we do not contemn these preparations, but set the highest
value on them; a belief in them we do contemn, because no one
thinks that they constitute a real and permanent structure. If
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The third excerpt represents the future or something you must embrace, and is drawn from Charmides by Plato: Jackson, about two octavo pages in length, there occur no less than seven
or eight references to Plato, although nothing really corresponding to them
can be found in his extant writings:--a small matter truly; but what a
light does it throw on the character of the entire book in which they
occur! We can hardly escape from the conclusion that they are not
statements of Aristotle respecting Plato, but of a later generation of
Aristotelians respecting a later generation of Platonists. (Compare the
striking remark of the great Scaliger respecting the Magna Moralia:--Haec
non sunt Aristotelis, tamen utitur auctor Aristotelis nomine tanquam suo.)
(2) There is no hint in Plato's own writings that he was conscious of
having made any change in the Doctrine of Ideas such as Dr. Jackson
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