| The first excerpt represents the past or something you must release, and is drawn from A treatise on Good Works by Dr. Martin Luther: which is daily increased through gluttony and drunkenness,
idleness and frippery. Yet we go our way as if we were
Christians; when we have been to church, have said our little
prayer, have observed the fasts and feasts, then we think our
whole duty is done.
Now, if no other work were commanded but chastity alone, we would
all have enough to do with this one; so perilous and raging a
vice is unchastity. It rages in all our members: in the thoughts
of our hearts, in the seeing of our eyes, in the hearing of our
ears, in the words of our mouth, in the works of our hands and
feet and all our body. To control all these requires labor and
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The second excerpt represents the present or the deciding factor of the moment, and is drawn from Protagoras by Plato: man dissembles his feelings, and constrains himself to praise them; and if
they have wronged him and he is angry, he pacifies his anger and is
reconciled, and compels himself to love and praise his own flesh and blood.
And Simonides, as is probable, considered that he himself had often had to
praise and magnify a tyrant or the like, much against his will, and he also
wishes to imply to Pittacus that he does not censure him because he is
censorious.
'For I am satisfied' he says, 'when a man is neither bad nor very stupid;
and when he knows justice (which is the health of states), and is of sound
mind, I will find no fault with him, for I am not given to finding fault,
and there are innumerable fools'
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The third excerpt represents the future or something you must embrace, and is drawn from The Scarlet Letter by Nathaniel Hawthorne: hand over his heart, as was his custom whenever his peculiarly
138 THE SCARLET LETTER
nervous temperament was thrown into agitation. He looked now
more careworn and emaciated than as we described him at the scene
of Hester's public ignominy; and whether it were his failing
The Scarlet Letter |
