| The first excerpt represents the past or something you must release, and is drawn from The Varieties of Religious Experience by William James: religious life. It seems to me to show clearly that the feeling
of reality may be something more like a sensation than an
intellectual operation properly so-called.
"Between twenty and thirty I gradually became more and more
agnostic and irreligious, yet I cannot say that I ever lost that
'indefinite consciousness' which Herbert Spencer describes so
well, of an Absolute Reality behind phenomena. For me this
Reality was not the pure Unknowable of Spencer's philosophy, for
although I had ceased my childish prayers to God, and never
prayed to IT in a formal manner, yet my more recent experience
shows me to have been in a relation to IT which practically was
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The second excerpt represents the present or the deciding factor of the moment, and is drawn from Poems by Bronte Sisters: For Nature's sad reality,
And tell the suffering heart how vain
Its cherished dreams must always be;
And Truth may rudely trample down
The flowers of Fancy, newly-blown:
But thou art ever there, to bring
The hovering vision back, and breathe
New glories o'er the blighted spring,
And call a lovelier Life from Death.
And whisper, with a voice divine,
Of real worlds, as bright as thine.
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The third excerpt represents the future or something you must embrace, and is drawn from Second Inaugural Address by Abraham Lincoln: contest which still absorbs the attention and engrosses the energies
of the nation, little that is new could be presented. The progress
of our arms, upon which all else chiefly depends, is as well known
to the public as to myself; and it is, I trust, reasonably satisfactory
and encouraging to all. With high hope for the future, no prediction
in regard to it is ventured.
On the occasion corresponding to this four years ago, all thoughts
were anxiously directed to an impending civil war. All dreaded it--
all sought to avert it. While the inaugural address was being delivered
from this place, devoted altogether to saving the Union without war,
insurgent agents were in the city seeking to destroy it without war--
Second Inaugural Address |
