| The first excerpt represents the past or something you must release, and is drawn from The New Machiavelli by H. G. Wells: nor how she came upon them. They run:--
"And if there be no meeting past the grave;
If all is darkness, silence, yet 'tis rest.
Be not afraid ye waiting hearts that weep,
For God still giveth His beloved sleep,
And if an endless sleep He wills, so best."
That scrap of verse amazed me when I read it. I could even wonder
if my mother really grasped the import of what she had copied out.
It affected me as if a stone-deaf person had suddenly turned and
joined in a whispered conversation. It set me thinking how far a
mind in its general effect quite hopelessly limited, might range.
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The second excerpt represents the present or the deciding factor of the moment, and is drawn from An Open Letter on Translating by Dr. Martin Luther: What is not the Word of God does not make Christendom.
We read that in the days of Elijah the prophet there was
apparently no word from God and not worship of God in Israel. For
Elijah says, "Lord, they have killed your prophets and destroyed
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
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The third excerpt represents the future or something you must embrace, and is drawn from Woman and Labour by Olive Schreiner: passes through the body of its womanhood as through a mould, reappearing
with the indelible marks of that mould upon it, that as the os cervix of
woman, through which the head of the human infant passes at birth, forms a
ring, determining for ever the size at birth of the human head, a size
which could only increase if in the course of ages the os cervix of woman
should itself slowly expand; and that so exactly the intellectual capacity,
the physical vigour, the emotional depth of woman, forms also an
untranscendable circle, circumscribing with each successive generation the
limits of the expansion of the human race;--even this fact she may not so
clearly have grasped intellectually as to be able to throw it into the form
of a logical statement. The profound truth, that the continued development
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