| The first excerpt represents the past or something you must release, and is drawn from Babbitt by Sinclair Lewis: member of the Presbyterian Church, and naturally, I accept its doctrines." If
you had been so brutal as to go on, he would have protested, "There's no use
discussing and arguing about religion; it just stirs up bad feeling."
Actually, the content of his theology was that there was a supreme being who
had tried to make us perfect, but presumably had failed; that if one was a
Good Man he would go to a place called Heaven (Babbitt unconsciously pictured
it as rather like an excellent hotel with a private garden), but if one was a
Bad Man, that is, if he murdered or committed burglary or used cocaine or had
mistresses or sold non-existent real estate, he would be punished. Babbitt was
uncertain, however, about what he called "this business of Hell." He
explained to Ted, "Of course I'm pretty liberal; I don't exactly believe in a
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The second excerpt represents the present or the deciding factor of the moment, and is drawn from Padre Ignacio by Owen Wister: vicars of every creed and heresy; and if the parish is lonely and the
worshipers few and seldom varying, a newcomer will gleam out like a new
book to be read. And a trained priest learns to read keenly the faces of
those who assemble to worship under his guidance. But American vagrants,
with no thoughts save of gold-digging, and an overweening illiterate
jargon for speech, had long ceased to interest this priest, even in his
starvation for company and talk from the outside world; and therefore
after the intoning he sat with his homesick thoughts unchanged, to draw
both pain and enjoyment from the music that he had set to the Dixit
Dominus. He listened to the tender chorus that opens William Tell; and,
as the Latin psalm proceeded, pictures of the past rose between him and
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The third excerpt represents the future or something you must embrace, and is drawn from A Prince of Bohemia by Honore de Balzac: guess that he was joking; she shrank back, stumbled over a chair, and
fell with her head against the corner of the marble chimney-piece. She
thought she should have died. When she could speak, poor woman, as she
lay on the bed, all that she said was, 'I deserved it, Charles!'
"For a moment La Palferine was in despair; his anguish revived
Claudine. She rejoiced in the mishap; she took advantage of her
suffering to compel La Palferine to take the money and release him
from an awkward position. Then followed a variation on La Fontaine's
fable, in which a man blesses the thieves that brought him a sudden
impulse of tenderness from his wife. And while we are upon this
subject, another saying will paint the man for you.
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