| The first excerpt represents the element of Air. It speaks of mental influences and the process of thought, and is drawn from The Unseen World and Other Essays by John Fiske: Jesus himself is, for that very reason, often vague, uncritical,
and contradictory. Still more is this true of the fourth gospel,
written late in the second century, in which historic tradition
is moulded in the interests of dogma until it becomes no longer
recognizable, and in the place of the human Messiah of the
earlier accounts, we have a semi-divine Logos or Aeon, detached
from God, and incarnate for a brief season in the likeness of
man.
[16] "Wer einmal vergottert worden ist, der hat seine Mensetheit
unwiederbringlich eingebusst."--Strauss, Der alte und der neue
Glaube, p. 76.
The Unseen World and Other Essays |
The second excerpt represents the element of Fire. It speaks of emotional influences and base passions, and is drawn from Uncle Tom's Cabin by Harriet Beecher Stowe: Legree encouraged his two black satellites to a kind of coarse
familiarity with him,--a familiarity, however, at any moment liable
to get one or the other of them into trouble; for, on the slightest
provocation, one of them always stood ready, at a nod, to be a
minister of his vengeance on the other.
As they stood there now by Legree, they seemed an apt illustration
of the fact that brutal men are lower even than animals.
Their coarse, dark, heavy features; their great eyes, rolling
enviously on each other; their barbarous, guttural, half-brute
intonation; their dilapidated garments fluttering in the wind,--were
all in admirable keeping with the vile and unwholesome character
Uncle Tom's Cabin |
| The third excerpt represents the element of Water. It speaks of pure spiritual influences and feelings of love, and is drawn from Babbitt by Sinclair Lewis: that my old dad--though otherwise he was perfectly sane, and packed an awful
wallop when it came to trimming the City Fellers at checkers--named me after
the family doc, old Dr. Ambrose Follansbee. I apologize, boys. In my next
what-d'you-call-it I'll see to it that I get named something really
practical--something that sounds swell and yet is good and virile--something,
in fact, like that grand old name so familiar to every household--that bold
and almost overpowering name, Willis Jimjams Ijams!"
He knew by the cheer that he was secure again and popular; he knew that he
would no more endanger his security and popularity by straying from the Clan
of Good Fellows.
V
|
The fourth excerpt represents the element of Earth. It speaks of physical influences and the impact of the unseen on the visible world, and is drawn from Early Short Fiction of Edith Wharton by Edith Wharton: and eighteen miles, entering the Amazon near the mouth of the
latter river. The upper course of the Xingu is auriferous and
fed by numerous branches. Its source was first discovered in
1884 by the German explorer von den Steinen, after a difficult
and dangerous expedition through a region inhabited by tribes
still in the Stone Age of culture.'"
The ladies received this communication in a state of stupefied
silence from which Mrs. Leveret was the first to rally. "She
certainly DID speak of its having branches."
The word seemed to snap the last thread of their incredulity.
"And of its great length," gasped Mrs. Ballinger.
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