| The first excerpt represents the element of Air. It speaks of mental influences and the process of thought, and is drawn from War of the Worlds by H. G. Wells: In one place we blundered upon a scorched and blackened
area, now cooling and ashen, and a number of scattered dead
bodies of men, burned horribly about the heads and trunks
but with their legs and boots mostly intact; and of dead
horses, fifty feet, perhaps, behind a line of four ripped guns
and smashed gun carriages.
Sheen, it seemed, had escaped destruction, but the place
was silent and deserted. Here we happened on no dead,
though the night was too dark for us to see into the side
roads of the place. In Sheen my companion suddenly com-
plained of faintness and thirst, and we decided to try one of
War of the Worlds |
The second excerpt represents the element of Fire. It speaks of emotional influences and base passions, and is drawn from The New Machiavelli by H. G. Wells: we were expected to behave. On the whole it is a population of poor
quality round about Cambridge, rather stunted and spiritless and
very difficult to idealise. That theoretical Working Man of ours!--
if we felt the clash at all we explained it, I suppose, by assuming
that he came from another part of the country; Esmeer, I remember,
who lived somewhere in the Fens, was very eloquent about the Cornish
fishermen, and Hatherleigh, who was a Hampshire man, assured us we
ought to know the Scottish miner. My private fancy was for the
Lancashire operative because of his co-operative societies, and
because what Lancashire thinks to-day England thinks to-morrow. . . .
And also I had never been in Lancashire.
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| The third excerpt represents the element of Water. It speaks of pure spiritual influences and feelings of love, and is drawn from Under the Red Robe by Stanley Weyman: bed, cut short his questions. In the morning we did not meet
until it was time to start.
Those who know the south road to Agen, and how the vineyards rise
in terraces north of the town, one level of red earth above
another, green in summer, but in late autumn bare and stony, may
remember a particular place where the road, two leagues from the
town, runs up a steep hill. At the top of the hill four roads
meet; and there, plain to be seen against the sky, is a finger-
post indicating which way leads to Bordeaux, and which to old
tiled Montauban, and which to Perigueux.
This hill had impressed me greatly on my journey south; perhaps
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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 Augsburg Confession by Philip Melanchthon: grace, were due to the merits going before, so as to be, not
the free gift of a donor, but the reward due to the laborer.
But, although this doctrine is despised by the inexperienced,
nevertheless God-fearing and anxious consciences find by
experience that it brings the greatest consolation, because
consciences cannot be set at rest through any works, but only
by faith, when they take the sure ground that for Christ's
sake they have a reconciled God. As Paul teaches Rom. 5, 1:
Being justified by faith, we have peace with God. This whole
doctrine is to be referred to that conflict of the terrified
conscience, neither can it be understood apart from that
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