| The first excerpt represents the past or something you must release, and is drawn from God The Invisible King by H. G. Wells: "The children adore him." If children are loved and trained to
truth, justice, and mutual forbearance, they will be ready for the
true God as their needs bring them within his scope. They should be
left to their innocence, and to their trust in the innocence of the
world, as long as they can be. They should be told only of God as a
Great Friend whom some day they will need more and understand and
know better. That is as much as most children need. The phrases of
religion put too early into their mouths may become a cant,
something worse than blasphemy.
Yet children are sometimes very near to God. Creative passion stirs
in their play. At times they display a divine simplicity. But it
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The second excerpt represents the present or the deciding factor of the moment, and is drawn from A House of Pomegranates by Oscar Wilde: petal for petal the same! It kissed it with like kisses, and
pressed it to its heart with horrible gestures.
When the truth dawned upon him, he gave a wild cry of despair, and
fell sobbing to the ground. So it was he who was misshapen and
hunchbacked, foul to look at and grotesque. He himself was the
monster, and it was at him that all the children had been laughing,
and the little Princess who he had thought loved him - she too had
been merely mocking at his ugliness, and making merry over his
twisted limbs. Why had they not left him in the forest, where
there was no mirror to tell him how loathsome he was? Why had his
father not killed him, rather than sell him to his shame? The hot
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The third excerpt represents the future or something you must embrace, and is drawn from Heart of the West by O. Henry: of pedagogy embraced only a knowledge of horse-breaking and a belief
in heredity.
The cowpunchers saw that their boss was trying to make a man out of
the strange animal that he had sent among them; and they tacitly
organised themselves into a faculty of assistants. But their system
was their own.
Curly's first lesson stuck. He became on friendly and then on intimate
terms with soap and water. And the thing that pleased Ranse most was
that his "subject" held his ground at each successive higher step. But
the steps were sometimes far apart.
Once he got at the quart bottle of whisky kept sacredly in the grub
Heart of the West |
