| The first excerpt represents the past or something you must release, and is drawn from Fisherman's Luck by Henry van Dyke: saucer of bread and milk, and stretched herself luxuriously
underneath the kitchen stove, while her faithful mistress washes up
the dishes. As for a dog, I am sure that his admiring love for his
master is never greater than when they come in together from the
hunt, wet and tired, and the man gathers a pile of wood in front of
the tent, touches it with a tiny magic wand, and suddenly the clear,
consoling flame springs up, saying cheerfully, "Here we are, at home
in the forest; come into the warmth; rest, and eat, and sleep."
When the weary, shivering dog sees this miracle, he knows that his
master is a great man and a lord of things.
After all, that is the only real open fire. Wood is the fuel for
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The second excerpt represents the present or the deciding factor of the moment, and is drawn from The Varieties of Religious Experience by William James: contrasted unfavorably with sensation.
It is a commonplace of metaphysics that God's knowledge cannot be
discursive but must be intuitive, that is, must be constructed
more after the pattern of what in ourselves is called immediate
feeling, than after that of proposition and judgment. But our
immediate feelings have no content but what the five senses
supply; and we have seen and shall see again that mystics may
emphatically deny that the senses play any part in the very
highest type of knowledge which their transports yield.
In the Christian church there have always been mystics. Although
many of them have been viewed with suspicion, some have gained
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The third excerpt represents the future or something you must embrace, and is drawn from The Profits of Religion by Upton Sinclair: increased from four thousand bales in 1791 to four hundred and
fifty thousand in 1820 and five million, four hundred thousand in
1860.
There was a new monarch, King Cotton, and his empire depended
upon slaves. According to the custom of monarchs since the dawn
of history, he hired the ministers of God to teach that what he
wanted was right and holy. From one end of the South to the other
the pulpits rang with the text: "Cursed be Canaan; a servant to
servants shall he be to his brethren." The learned Bishop
Hopkins, in his "Bible View of Slavery", gave the standard
interpretation of this text:
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