| The first excerpt represents the past or something you must release, and is drawn from Alexandria and her Schools by Charles Kingsley: from that moment inverted. With Plotinus and his school man is seeking
for God: with Clement and his, God is seeking for man. With the
former, God is passive, and man active: with the latter, God is active,
man is passive--passive, that is, in so far as his business is to listen
when he is spoken to, to look at the light which is unveiled to him, to
submit himself to the inward laws which he feels reproving and checking
him at every turn, as Socrates was reproved and checked by his inward
Daemon.
Whether of these two theorems gives the higher conception either of the
Divine Being, or of man, I leave it for you to judge. To those old
Alexandrian Christians, a being who was not seeking after every single
|
The second excerpt represents the present or the deciding factor of the moment, and is drawn from Jude the Obscure by Thomas Hardy: From the looming roof of the great library, into which he hardly
ever had time to enter, his gaze travelled on to the varied spires,
halls, gables, streets, chapels, gardens, quadrangles, which composed
the ensemble of this unrivalled panorama. He saw that his destiny lay
not with these, but among the manual toilers in the shabby purlieu
which he himself occupied, unrecognized as part of the city at all
by its visitors and panegyrists, yet without whose denizens the hard
readers could not read nor the high thinkers live.
He looked over the town into the country beyond, to the trees
which screened her whose presence had at first been the support
of his heart, and whose loss was now a maddening torture.
Jude the Obscure |
The third excerpt represents the future or something you must embrace, and is drawn from The Great Big Treasury of Beatrix Potter by Beatrix Potter: The first one sang--"Who's bin
digging-up MY nuts? Who's-been-
digging-up MY nuts?"
And another sang--"Little bita
bread and-NO-cheese! Little bit-a-
bread an'-NO-cheese!"
The squirrels followed and listened.
The first little bird flew into
the bush where Timmy and Goody
Tiptoes were quietly tying up their
bags, and it sang--"Who's-bin
|
