| The first excerpt represents the past or something you must release, and is drawn from An Open Letter on Translating by Dr. Martin Luther: your altars, and I am left totally alone" [I Kings 19]. Here King
Ahab and others could have said, "Elijah, with talk like that you
are condemning all the people of God." However God had at the
same time kept seven thousand [I Kings 19]. How? Do you not also
think that God could now, under the papacy, have preserved his
own, even though the priests and monks of Christendom have been
teachers of the devil and gone to hell? Many children and young
people have died in Christ. For even under the anti-Christ,
Christ has strongly sustained baptism, the bare text of the gospel
in the pulpit, the Lord's Prayer, and the Creed. By this means he
sustained many of his Christians, and therefore also his
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The second excerpt represents the present or the deciding factor of the moment, and is drawn from Protagoras by Plato: good-looking, and rich, and noble, they will not listen to him, but laugh
and hoot at him, until either he is clamoured down and retires of himself;
or if he persist, he is dragged away or put out by the constables at the
command of the prytanes. This is their way of behaving about professors of
the arts. But when the question is an affair of state, then everybody is
free to have a say--carpenter, tinker, cobbler, sailor, passenger; rich and
poor, high and low--any one who likes gets up, and no one reproaches him,
as in the former case, with not having learned, and having no teacher, and
yet giving advice; evidently because they are under the impression that
this sort of knowledge cannot be taught. And not only is this true of the
state, but of individuals; the best and wisest of our citizens are unable
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The third excerpt represents the future or something you must embrace, and is drawn from First Inaugural Address by Abraham Lincoln: confederacy a year or two hence arbitrarily secede again,
precisely as portions of the present Union now claim to secede from it?
All who cherish disunion sentiments are now being educated to the
exact temper of doing this.
Is there such perfect identity of interests among the States
to compose a new Union, as to produce harmony only,
and prevent renewed secession?
Plainly, the central idea of secession is the essence of anarchy.
A majority held in restraint by constitutional checks and limitations,
and always changing easily with deliberate changes of popular
opinions and sentiments, is the only true sovereign of a free people.
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