| The first excerpt represents the past or something you must release, and is drawn from The Voyage of the Beagle by Charles Darwin: to ascend through the gorge by which the river Grose joins
the Nepean, yet the valley of the Grose in its upper part,
as I saw, forms a magnificent level basin some miles in
width, and is on all sides surrounded by cliffs, the summits
of which are believed to be nowhere less than 3000 feet
above the level of the sea. When cattle are driven into the
valley of the Wolgan by a path (which I descended), partly
natural and partly made by the owner of the land, they cannot
escape; for this valley is in every other part surrounded
by perpendicular cliffs, and eight miles lower down, it
contracts from an average width of half a mile, to a mere
The Voyage of the Beagle |
The second excerpt represents the present or the deciding factor of the moment, and is drawn from The Battle of the Books by Jonathan Swift: defy the parson. From which, and many the like instances easy to
be produced, I think nothing can be more manifest than that the
quarrel is not against any particular points of hard digestion in
the Christian system, but against religion in general, which, by
laying restraints on human nature, is supposed the great enemy to
the freedom of thought and action.
Upon the whole, if it shall still be thought for the benefit of
Church and State that Christianity be abolished, I conceive,
however, it may be more convenient to defer the execution to a time
of peace, and not venture in this conjuncture to disoblige our
allies, who, as it falls out, are all Christians, and many of them,
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The third excerpt represents the future or something you must embrace, and is drawn from Pagan and Christian Creeds by Edward Carpenter: minute details. This is a theory which commends itself
greatly to a deeper and more philosophical consideration;
but it brings us up point-blank against another
most difficult question (which we have already raised),
namely, how to account for extremely rude and primitive
peoples in the far past, and on the very borderland
of the animal life, having been SUSCEPTIBLE to the germs
of great religious ideas (such as we have mentioned) and
having been instinctively--though not of course by any process
of conscious reasoning--moved to express them in
symbols and rites and ceremonials, and (later no doubt)
Pagan and Christian Creeds |
