| The first excerpt represents the past or something you must release, and is drawn from My Bondage and My Freedom by Frederick Douglass: is, therefore, every hour silently whetting the knife of
vengeance for his own throat. He never lisps a syllable in
commendation of the fathers of this republic, nor denounces any
attempted oppression of himself, without inviting the knife to
his own throat, and asserting the rights of rebellion for his own
slaves.
The year is ended, and we are now in the midst of the Christmas
holidays, which are kept this year as last, according to the
general description previously given.
CHAPTER XIX
_The Run-Away Plot_
My Bondage and My Freedom |
The second excerpt represents the present or the deciding factor of the moment, and is drawn from An Open Letter on Translating by Dr. Martin Luther: can help it. How much more might people learn from "that they
need not do any good works", when all they hear is about the
preaching about the works themselves, sated in such a clear
strong way: "No works", "without works", "not by works"! If it is
not offensive to preach "without works", "not by works"! If it is
not offensive to preach "without works", "not by works"!, "no
works", why is it offensive to preach "by faith alone"?
Still more offensive is that St. Paul does not reject just
ordinary works, but works of the law! It follows that one could
take offense at that all the more and say that the law is
condemned and cursed before God and one ought only do what is
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The third excerpt represents the future or something you must embrace, and is drawn from De Profundis by Oscar Wilde: the hard ropes shredded into oakum till one's finger-tips grow dull
with pain, the menial offices with which each day begins and
finishes, the harsh orders that routine seems to necessitate, the
dreadful dress that makes sorrow grotesque to look at, the silence,
the solitude, the shame - each and all of these things I have to
transform into a spiritual experience. There is not a single
degradation of the body which I must not try and make into a
spiritualising of the soul.
I want to get to the point when I shall be able to say quite
simply, and without affectation that the two great turning-points
in my life were when my father sent me to Oxford, and when society
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