| The first excerpt represents the past or something you must release, and is drawn from Mosses From An Old Manse by Nathaniel Hawthorne: see nothing beyond credibility in the remarkable incidents of our
story. Indeed, the great difficulty will be at once got over, if
we can only bring ourselves to believe that, as soon as the old
dame bade him puff, there came a whiff of smoke from the
scarecrow's mouth. It was the very feeblest of whiffs, to be
sure; but it was followed by another and another, each more
decided than the preceding one.
"Puff away, my pet! puff away, my pretty one!" Mother Rigby kept
repeating, with her pleasantest smile. "It is the breath of life
to ye; and that you may take my word for."
Beyond all question the pipe was bewitched. There must have been
Mosses From An Old Manse |
The second excerpt represents the present or the deciding factor of the moment, and is drawn from House of Mirth by Edith Wharton:
How beautiful it was--and how she loved beauty! She had always
felt that her sensibility in this direction made up for certain
obtusenesses of feeling of which she was less proud; and during
the last three months she had indulged it passionately. The
Dorsets' invitation to go abroad with them had come as an almost
miraculous release from crushing difficulties; and her faculty
for renewing herself in new scenes, and casting off problems of
conduct as easily as the surroundings in which they had arisen,
made the mere change from one place to another seem, not merely a
postponement, but a solution of her troubles. Moral complications
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The third excerpt represents the future or something you must embrace, and is drawn from God The Invisible King by H. G. Wells: make himself known to us. When at last the individual breaks
through the limiting darknesses to him, the irradiation of that
moment, the smile and soul clasp, is in God as well as in man. He
has won us from his enemy. We come staggering through into the
golden light of his kingdom, to fight for his kingdom henceforth,
until at last we are altogether taken up into his being.
CHAPTER THE FOURTH
THE RELIGION OF ATHEISTS
1. THE SCIENTIFIC ATHEIST
It is a curious thing that while most organised religions seem to
drape about and conceal and smother the statement of the true God,
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