| The first excerpt represents the past or something you must release, and is drawn from The Varieties of Religious Experience by William James: such experiences. In the extreme of melancholy the self that
consciously is can do absolutely nothing. It is completely
bankrupt and without resource, and no works it can accomplish
will avail. Redemption from such subjective conditions must be a
free gift or nothing, and grace through Christ's accomplished
sacrifice is such a gift.
"God," says Luther, "is the God of the humble, the miserable, the
oppressed, and the desperate, and of those that are brought even
to nothing; and his nature is to give sight to the blind, to
comfort the broken-hearted, to justify sinners, to save the very
desperate and damned. Now that pernicious and pestilent opinion
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The second excerpt represents the present or the deciding factor of the moment, and is drawn from Finished by H. Rider Haggard: things, then through my dreams it seemed to me that I heard two
voices talking, those of our Marnham and Rodd, not on the stoep,
but at a distance from it. As a matter of fact they were
talking, but so far away that in my ordinary waking state I could
never have heard them. My own belief is that the senses, and I
may add the semi-spiritual part of us, are much more acute when
we lie half bound in the bonds of sleep, than when we are what is
called wide awake. Doubtless when we are quite bound they attain
the limits of their power and, I think, sail at times to the
uttermost ends of being. But unhappily of their experiences we
remember nothing when we awake. In half sleep it is different;
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The third excerpt represents the future or something you must embrace, and is drawn from Flame and Shadow by Sara Teasdale: In a Hospital
IV
Open Windows
The New Moon
Eight O'Clock
Lost Things
Pain
The Broken Field
The Unseen
A Prayer
V
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