| The first excerpt represents the past or something you must release, and is drawn from The Country Doctor by Honore de Balzac: traced, shone for me with divine brightness.
"I still had eighty thousand francs in my possession, and at first I
meant to live a remote and solitary life, to vegetate in some country
district for the rest of my days; but misanthropy is no Catholic
virtue, and there is a certain vanity lurking beneath the hedgehog's
skin of the misanthrope. His heart does not bleed, it shrivels, and my
heart bled from every vein. I thought of the discipline of the Church,
the refuge that she affords to sorrowing souls, understood at last the
beauty of a life of prayer in solitude, and was fully determined to
'enter religion,' in the grand old phrase. So far my intentions were
firmly fixed, but I had not yet decided on the best means of carrying
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The second excerpt represents the present or the deciding factor of the moment, and is drawn from An Open Letter on Translating by Dr. Martin Luther: that word "sola" than simply "Luther will have it so, and he says
that he is a doctor above all the papal doctors." Let it remain
at that. I will, from now on, hold them in contempt, and have
already held them in contempt, as long as they are the kind of
people that they are - asses, I should say. And there are brazen
idiots among them who have never learned their own art of
sophistry - like Dr. Schmidt and Snot-Nose, and such like them.
They set themselves against me in this matter, which not only
transcends sophistry, but as St. Paul writes, all the wisdom and
understanding in the world as well. An ass truly does not have to
sing much as he is already known for his ears.
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The third excerpt represents the future or something you must embrace, and is drawn from Options by O. Henry: you never said--oh, come up to the house, please--I can't say what I
want to over the 'phone. You are so importunate. But please come up
to the house, won't you?"
Would I?
I rang the bell of the Telfair house violently. Some sort of a human
came to the door and shooed me into the drawing-room.
"Oh, well," said I to myself, looking at the ceiling, "any one can
learn from any one. That was a pretty good philosophy of Mack's,
anyhow. He didn't take advantage of his experience, but I get the
benefit of it. If you want to get into the professional class, you've
got to--"
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