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The excerpt represents the core issue or deciding factor on which you must meditate, and is drawn from Alexandria and her Schools by Charles Kingsley: ask them, Can any man be strong by believing a lie? Have you not told
us, nobly enough, that every lie is by its nature rotten, doomed to
death, certain to prove its own impotence, and be shattered to atoms the
moment you try to use it, to bring it into rude actual contact with
fact, and Nature, and the eternal laws? Faith to be strong must be
faith in something which is not one's self; faith in something eternal,
something objective, something true, which would exist just as much
though we and all the world disbelieved it. The strength of belief
comes from that which is believed in; if you separate it from that, it
becomes a mere self-opinion, a sensation of positiveness; and what sort
of strength that will give, history will tell us in the tragedies of the
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