| The first excerpt represents the past or something you must release, and is drawn from The Augsburg Confession by Philip Melanchthon: but not that we may merit grace or make satisfaction for sins
by such exercises. And such external discipline ought to be
urged at all times, not only on a few and set days. So Christ
commands, Luke 21, 34: Take heed lest your hearts be
overcharged with surfeiting; also Matt. 17, 21: This kind
goeth not out but by prayer and fasting. Paul also says, 1
Cor. 9, 27: I keep under my body and bring it into subjection.
Here he clearly shows that he was keeping under his body, not
to merit forgiveness of sins by that discipline, but to have
his body in subjection and fitted for spiritual things, and
for the discharge of duty according to his calling. Therefore,
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The second excerpt represents the present or the deciding factor of the moment, and is drawn from Beast in the Jungle by Henry James: in London. It was the first allusion they had yet again made,
needing any other hitherto so little; but when she replied, after
having given him the news, that she was by no means satisfied with
such a trifle as the climax to so special a suspense, she almost
set him wondering if she hadn't even a larger conception of
singularity for him than he had for himself. He was at all events
destined to become aware little by little, as time went by, that
she was all the while looking at his life, judging it, measuring
it, in the light of the thing she knew, which grew to be at last,
with the consecration of the years, never mentioned between them
save as "the real truth" about him. That had always been his own
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The third excerpt represents the future or something you must embrace, and is drawn from The Republic by Plato: iron; and the species will generally be preserved in the children. But as
all are of the same original stock, a golden parent will sometimes have a
silver son, or a silver parent a golden son. And God proclaims as a first
principle to the rulers, and above all else, that there is nothing which
they should so anxiously guard, or of which they are to be such good
guardians, as of the purity of the race. They should observe what elements
mingle in their offspring; for if the son of a golden or silver parent has
an admixture of brass and iron, then nature orders a transposition of
ranks, and the eye of the ruler must not be pitiful towards the child
because he has to descend in the scale and become a husbandman or artisan,
just as there may be sons of artisans who having an admixture of gold or
The Republic |
