| The first excerpt represents the past or something you must release, and is drawn from A Voyage to Abyssinia by Father Lobo: arise on either side, they may separate, and marry whom they please,
each taking back what they brought with them.
Chapter IV
An account of the religion of the Abyssins.
Yet though there is a great difference between our manners, customs,
civil government, and those of the Abyssins, there is yet a much
greater in points of faith; for so many errors have been introduced
and ingrafted into their religion, by their ignorance, their
separation from the Catholic Church, and their intercourse with
Jews, Pagans, and Mohammedans, that their present religion is
nothing but a kind of confused miscellany of Jewish and Mohammedan
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The second excerpt represents the present or the deciding factor of the moment, and is drawn from Philebus by Plato: the Stoics, the Epicureans, and a few modern teachers, such as Kant and
Bentham, have each of them supplied 'moments' of thought to the world. The
life of Christ has embodied a divine love, wisdom, patience,
reasonableness. For his image, however imperfectly handed down to us, the
modern world has received a standard more perfect in idea than the
societies of ancient times, but also further removed from practice. For
there is certainly a greater interval between the theory and practice of
Christians than between the theory and practice of the Greeks and Romans;
the ideal is more above us, and the aspiration after good has often lent a
strange power to evil. And sometimes, as at the Reformation, or French
Revolution, when the upper classes of a so-called Christian country have
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The third excerpt represents the future or something you must embrace, and is drawn from Eighteenth Brumaire of Louis Bonaparte by Karl Marx: undefined monster magnitude of their own objects--until finally that
situation is created which renders all retreat impossible, and the
conditions themselves cry out:
"Hic Rhodus, hic salta !" [#2 Here is Rhodes, leap here! An allusion to
Aesop's Fables.]
Every observer of average intelligence; even if he failed to follow step
by step the course of French development, must have anticipated that an
unheard of fiasco was in store for the revolution. It was enough to
hear the self-satisfied yelpings of victory wherewith the Messieurs
Democrats mutually congratulated one another upon the pardons of May 2d,
1852. Indeed, May 2d had become a fixed idea in their heads; it had
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