| The first excerpt represents the element of Air. It speaks of mental influences and the process of thought, and is drawn from The Europeans by Henry James: His collegiate peccadilloes had aroused a domestic murmur
as disagreeable to the young man as the creaking of his boots
would have been to a house-breaker. Only, as the house-breaker
would have simplified matters by removing his chaussures,
it had seemed to Clifford that the shortest cut to comfortable
relations with people--relations which should make him cease to
think that when they spoke to him they meant something improving--
was to renounce all ambition toward a nefarious development.
And, in fact, Clifford's ambition took the most commendable form.
He thought of himself in the future as the well-known and much-liked
Mr. Wentworth, of Boston, who should, in the natural course
|
The second excerpt represents the element of Fire. It speaks of emotional influences and base passions, and is drawn from The Varieties of Religious Experience by William James: of the importance of this type of regeneration, with little or no
intellectual readjustment, this writer surely makes it too
exclusive. It corresponds to the subjectively centered form of
morbid melancholy, of which Bunyan and Alline were examples. But
we saw in our seventh lecture that there are objective forms of
melancholy also, in which the lack of rational meaning of the
universe, and of life anyhow, is the burden that weighs upon
one--you remember Tolstoy's case.[106] So there are distinct
elements in conversion, and their relations to individual lives
deserve to be discriminated.[107]
[105] A restaurant waiter served provisionally as Gough's
|
| The third excerpt represents the element of Water. It speaks of pure spiritual influences and feelings of love, and is drawn from Concerning Christian Liberty by Martin Luther: up in Him, and since she has in her Husband Christ a
righteousness which she may claim as her own, and which she can
set up with confidence against all her sins, against death and
hell, saying, "If I have sinned, my Christ, in whom I believe,
has not sinned; all mine is His, and all His is mine," as it is
written, "My beloved is mine, and I am His" (Cant. ii. 16). This
is what Paul says: "Thanks be to God, which giveth us the victory
through our Lord Jesus Christ," victory over sin and death, as he
says, "The sting of death is sin, and the strength of sin is the
law" (1 Cor. xv. 56, 57).
>From all this you will again understand why so much importance is
|
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 The Hated Son by Honore de Balzac: overcome by a sort of religious contrition. He knelt down upon the
sand and made a vow:--
"I swear to build a chapel to Saint-Jean and Saint-Etienne, the
patrons of my wife and son, and to found one hundred masses in honor
of the Virgin, if God and the saints will restore to me the affection
of my son, the Duc de Nivron, here present."
He remained on his knees in deep humility with clasped hands, praying.
Finding that his son, the hope of his name, still did not come to him,
great tears rose in his eyes, dry so long, and rolled down his
withered cheeks. At this moment, Etienne, hearing no further sounds,
glided to the opening of his grotto like a young adder craving the
|
