| The first excerpt represents the past or something you must release, and is drawn from Father Damien by Robert Louis Stevenson: to read: I conceive you as a man quite beyond and below the
reticences of civility: with what measure you mete, with that shall
it be measured you again; with you, at last, I rejoice to feel the
button off the foil and to plunge home. And if in aught that I
shall say I should offend others, your colleagues, whom I respect
and remember with affection, I can but offer them my regret; I am
not free, I am inspired by the consideration of interests far more
large; and such pain as can be inflicted by anything from me must
be indeed trifling when compared with the pain with which they read
your letter. It is not the hangman, but the criminal, that brings
dishonour on the house.
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The second excerpt represents the present or the deciding factor of the moment, and is drawn from God The Invisible King by H. G. Wells: The writer believes that the centuries of fluid religious thought
that preceded the violent ultimate crystallisation of Nicaea, was
essentially a struggle--obscured, of course, by many complexities--
to reconcile and get into a relationship these two separate main
series of God-ideas.
Putting the leading id a part against evil.
The writer believes that these dogmas of relationship are not merely
extraneous to religion, but an impediment to religion. His aim in
this book is to give a statement of religion which is no longer
entangled in such speculations and disputes.
Let him add only one other note of explanation in this preface, and
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The third excerpt represents the future or something you must embrace, and is drawn from Eighteenth Brumaire of Louis Bonaparte by Karl Marx: when they still disposed over the parliamentary majority and over all
the machinery of government, was daily slipping from their weak hands.
Finally, the Constitution entrusts itself for safe keeping, in a
melodramatic paragraph, "to the watchfulness and patriotism of the whole
French people, and of each individual Frenchman," after having just
before, in another paragraph entrusted the "watchful" and the
"patriotic" themselves to the tender, inquisitorial attention of the
High Court, instituted by itself.
That was the Constitution of 1848, which on, the 2d of December, 1851,
was not overthrown by one head, but tumbled down at the touch of a mere
hat; though, true enough, that hat was a three-cornered Napoleon hat.
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