| The first excerpt represents the past or something you must release, and is drawn from The Augsburg Confession by Philip Melanchthon: absolution, and because it is otherwise useful to the
conscience, Confession is retained among us.
Article XXVI: Of the Distinction of Meats.
It has been the general persuasion, not of the people alone,
but also of those teaching in the churches, that making
Distinctions of Meats, and like traditions of men, are works
profitable to merit grace, and able to make satisfactions for
sins. And that the world so thought, appears from this, that
new ceremonies, new orders, new holy-days, and new fastings
were daily instituted, and the teachers in the churches did
exact these works as a service necessary to merit grace, and
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The second excerpt represents the present or the deciding factor of the moment, and is drawn from The Rescue by Joseph Conrad: well as to hear. But it was too difficult. He was seduced away by
the tense feeling of existence far superior to the mere
consciousness of life, and which in its immensity of
contradictions, delight, dread, exultation and despair could not
be faced and yet was not to be evaded. There was no peace in it.
But who wanted peace? Surrender was better, the dreadful ease of
slack limbs in the sweep of an enormous tide and in a divine
emptiness of mind. If this was existence then he knew that he
existed. And he knew that the woman existed, too, in the sweep of
the tide, without speech, without movement, without heat!
Indestructible--and, perhaps, immortal!
The Rescue |
The third excerpt represents the future or something you must embrace, and is drawn from In Darkest England and The Way Out by General William Booth: upon the branches of the crab. To change the nature of the individual,
to get at the heart, to save his soul is the only real, lasting method
of doing him any good. In many modern schemes of social regeneration
it is forgotten that "it takes a soul to move a body, e'en to a cleaner
sty," and at the risk of being misunderstood and misrepresented, I must
assert in the most unqualified way that it is primarily and mainly for
the sake of saving the soul that I seek the salvation of the body.
But what is the use of preaching the Gospel to men whose whole
attention is concentrated upon a mad, desperate struggle to keep
themselves alive? You might as well give a tract to a shipwrecked
sailor who is battling with the surf which has drowned his comrades and
In Darkest England and The Way Out |
