| The first excerpt represents the past or something you must release, and is drawn from Second Inaugural Address by Abraham Lincoln: were anxiously directed to an impending civil war. All dreaded it--
all sought to avert it. While the inaugural address was being delivered
from this place, devoted altogether to saving the Union without war,
insurgent agents were in the city seeking to destroy it without war--
seeking to dissolve the Union, and divide effects, by negotiation.
Both parties deprecated war; but one of them would make war rather
than let the nation survive; and the other would accept war rather
than let it perish. And the war came.
One-eighth of the whole population were colored slaves, not distributed
generally over the Union, but localized in the Southern part of it.
These slaves constituted a peculiar and powerful interest. All knew
Second Inaugural Address |
The second excerpt represents the present or the deciding factor of the moment, and is drawn from A Voyage to Abyssinia by Father Lobo: Order of the Jesuits at the age of sixteen. After passing through
the studies by which Jesuits were trained for missionary work, which
included special attention to the arts of speaking and writing,
Father Lobo was sent as a missionary to India at the age of twenty-
eight, in the year 1621. He reached Goa, as his book tells, in
1622, and was in 1624, at the age of thirty-one, told off as one of
the missionaries to be employed in the conversion of the
Abyssinians. They were to be converted, from a form of Christianity
peculiar to themselves, to orthodox Catholicism. The Abyssinian
Emperor Segued was protector of the enterprise, of which we have
here the story told.
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The third excerpt represents the future or something you must embrace, and is drawn from Mosses From An Old Manse by Nathaniel Hawthorne: plague on such ingenuity! All the effect that ever I knew of it
was to spoil the accuracy of some of the best watches in my shop.
He would turn the sun out of its orbit and derange the whole
course of time, if, as I said before, his ingenuity could grasp
anything bigger than a child's toy!"
"Hush, father! He hears you!" whispered Annie, pressing the old
man's arm. "His ears are as delicate as his feelings; and you
know how easily disturbed they are. Do let us move on."
So Peter Hovenden and his daughter Annie plodded on without
further conversation, until in a by-street of the town they found
themselves passing the open door of a blacksmith's shop. Within
Mosses From An Old Manse |
