| The first excerpt represents the past or something you must release, and is drawn from Travels with a Donkey in the Cevenne by Robert Louis Stevenson: roofed and sending up domestic smoke; and in the chestnut gardens,
in low and leafy corners, many a prosperous farmer returns, when
the day's work is done, to his children and bright hearth. And
still it was perhaps the wildest view of all my journey. Peak upon
peak, chain upon chain of hills ran surging southward, channelled
and sculptured by the winter streams, feathered from head to foot
with chestnuts, and here and there breaking out into a coronal of
cliffs. The sun, which was still far from setting, sent a drift of
misty gold across the hill-tops, but the valleys were already
plunged in a profound and quiet shadow.
A very old shepherd, hobbling on a pair of sticks, and wearing a
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The second excerpt represents the present or the deciding factor of the moment, and is drawn from The Woodlanders by Thomas Hardy: late sadness like a released spring; her senses revelled in the
sudden lapse back to nature unadorned. The consciousness of
having to be genteel because of her husband's profession, the
veneer of artificiality which she had acquired at the fashionable
schools, were thrown off, and she became the crude, country girl
of her latent, earliest instincts.
Nature was bountiful, she thought. No sooner had she been starved
off by Edgar Fitzpiers than another being, impersonating bare and
undiluted manliness, had arisen out of the earth, ready to hand.
This was an excursion of the imagination which she did not
encourage, and she said suddenly, to disguise the confused regard
The Woodlanders |
The third excerpt represents the future or something you must embrace, and is drawn from The Large Catechism by Dr. Martin Luther: importance God attaches to the fact that we are sure we do not pray in
vain, and that we do not in any way despise our prayer.
Part Fourth.
OF BAPTISM.
We have now finished the three chief parts of the common Christian
doctrine. Besides these we have yet to speak of our two Sacraments
instituted by Christ, of which also every Christian ought to have at
least an ordinary, brief instruction, because without them there can be
no Christian; although, alas! hitherto no instruction concerning them
has been given. But, in the first place, we take up Baptism, by which
we are first received into the Christian Church. However, in order that
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